“No revolution,” says Madame de Staël, “can succeed in any country, unless it is headed by a portion of the higher, and the majority of the middle classes.” Recent events have afforded another to the many confirmations which history affords of this important observation. Had the National Guard of Paris stood firm, the troops of the line would never have wavered; the government would not have been intimidated; a socialist revolution would have been averted; public credit preserved; the savings’ bank, the place of deposit of the poor—the public funds, the investment of the middle classes—saved from destruction. When we contemplate the dreadful monetary crisis which has been brought on in France by the revolution; when we behold the bank of France suspending payments, and all the chief banks of the metropolis rendered bankrupt by the shock; when we behold wealth in ship-loads flying from its menaced shores, and destitution in crowds stalking through its crowded and idle streets, we are struck with horror, and impressed with a deeper sense of thankfulness at the good sense and patriotic spirit of the middle classes in this country, which has so quickly crushed the efforts of the seditious to involve us in similar calamities. “The unbought loyalty of men,—the cheap defence of nations,”—still, thank God! subsists amongst us. The poison of infidelity has not destroyed the moral bonds of society—the rolling-stone of revolution has not crushed the institutions of freedom amongst us. There are hearts to love their country—arms to defend their Queen—not less among our civil than our military defenders. The pillage of Glasgow on the first outbreak of the disturbances there, their speedy suppression, by the energy of the inhabitants, has not been lost on the empire. It is not in vain that twenty thousand constables came forward to be enrolled in one day in Glasgow, and eleven thousand in Manchester. We see what we have to expect from the seditious; they see what they have to expect from the middle classes of society, and the whole virtuous part of the lower. With such dispositions in both, Great Britain may be exposed to local disorder or momentary alarm, but it can never be seriously endangered, or undergo that worst of horrors—a social revolution. Nor will she, with such dispositions in her people, be less prepared to assert the ancient glory of her arms, should circumstances render that alternative necessary. She has no internal reforms to make that she cannot achieve peaceably, by the means which her constitution affords. Her giant strength slumbers, not sleeps. Our ships of war, in the noble words of Mr Canning, “how soon one of those stupendous masses, now reposing on their shadows in perfect stillness,—how soon, upon any call of patriotism, or of necessity, it would assume the likeness of an animated thing, instinct with life and motion—how soon it would ruffle, as it were, its swelling plumage—how quickly it would put forth all its