All men of sense and sincerity will at once answer this last question in the affirmative. They will all say that this is not _opposition_ to the Ministers. The Ministers do not _wish_ to see 40,000 families, nor any families at all (who give them _no real annoyance_), reduced to misery; they do not _wish_ to cripple their own tax-payers; very far from it. If they could carry on the debt and dead-weight and place and pension and barrack system, without reducing any _quiet_ people to misery, they would like it exceedingly. But they _do_ wish to carry on that system; and he does not _oppose_ them who does not endeavour to put an end to the system. This is done by nobody in Parliament; and, therefore, there is, in fact, _no opposition_; and this is felt by the whole nation; and this is the reason why _the people_ now take so little interest in what is said and done in Parliament, compared to that which they formerly took. This is the reason why there is no man, or men, whom the people seem to care at all about. A great portion of the people now clearly understand the nature and effects of the system; they are not now to be deceived by speeches and professions. If Pitt and Fox had _now to start_, there would be no "Pittites" and "Foxites." Those happy days of political humbug are gone for ever. The "gentlemen _opposite_" are opposite only as to mere _local position_. They sit on the opposite side of the House: that's all. In every other respect they are like parson and clerk; or, perhaps, rather more like the rooks and jackdaws: one _caw_ and the other _chatter_; but both have the same object in view: both are in pursuit of the same sort of diet. One set is, to be sure, IN place, and the other OUT; but, though the rooks keep the jackdaws on the inferior branches, these latter would be as clamorous as the rooks themselves against _felling the tree_; and just as clamorous would the "gentlemen opposite" be against any one who should propose to put down the system itself. And yet, unless you do _that_, things must go on in the present way, and _felons_ must be _better fed_ than _honest labourers_; and starvation and thieving and robbing and gaol-building and transporting and hanging and penal laws must go on increasing, as they have gone on from the day of the establishment of the debt to the present hour. Apropos of _penal laws_, Doctor Black (of the Morning Chronicle) is now filling whole columns with very just remarks on the new and terrible law, which makes the taking of an apple _felony_; but he says not a word about the _silence_ of Sir Jammy (the humane _code-softener_) upon this subject! The "_humanity_ and _liberality_" of the Parliament have relieved men addicted to _fraud_ and to _certain other crimes_ from the disgrace of the pillory, and they have, since Castlereagh cut his own throat, relieved _self-slayers_ from the disgrace of the cross-road burial; but the same Parliament, amidst all the workings of this rare