'We desire, in truth, that the government were more impartial and more just than it is at present, towards those whose interests it administers; that it treated Catholics as Protestants, and all its subjects like freemen who deserve to be free, and who are entitled to say to the heads of the government,"Listen to our complaints; redress our griefs; be men, not of a party, of a sect, of a few provinces, of certain interests of a coterie, but of the interests of all: the men, in a word, of the nation and the law." We wish all this, but it is as much for the safety of the government as the prosperity of the people. We protest loudly and strongly against the idea, so false and absurd, which has been lately spread by a pamphlet which has excited a sensation; to wit, that the Belgians desire to be placed under the power of the French. Facts only can answer such charges: each of us will make it his business to refute it when the case requires it.

We shall remain as we are, considering France always as the focus of intelligence, and the fruitful mother of ideas, lofty, noble and generous, as a true school of mutual instruction; for all that constitutes the liberty and dignity of mankind, it shall be our glory to be friendly to it, to be allied with it, and to march always at its side in the path of duty and honour. But we repel with energy the idea of its ruling over us.

'We wish not to diminish the power of the government, to encumber its progress, to paralyze its force, to compromise its independence. We wish simply, that it should remain faithful to the laws it has sworn to maintain; that it should renounce its system of legislating by proclamations, by circular instructions which, under the forms of legality, conceal an arbitrary power: that it do not quibble us out of the right to use the language of our choice, and of our civilization: that it acknowledge frankly, the right we undoubtedly possess, of inculcating the principles by which this social existence should be guided; that itself make the agents of its authority responsible for their acts; that it restore to liberty the writers it has thrown into prison, simply because ten months ago they uttered a cry of alarm, which all the world is now repeating after them, and to which the government, if it would avoid a crisis, would do well to lend an attentive ear; that lastly, it be more economical in its expenses, and less destructive of our fortunes.'-Sep. 25th, 1829.

In spite of the logic of the advocates, and the innocence of the accused, four of them were condemned. De Potter to eight years of banishment, Tielemans and Barthels to six years of banishment, and J. B. de Nevé to five and each respectively on their return, to the same number of years of surveillance by the police.

In fact, the government were determined to convict, and the principal judge observed accidentally, that they should be obliged to be severe. The system under which they were banished has been continued; a sort of crusade has been carried on against the press, and a spirit of absolutism shown itself in all the proceedings of administration; and had not the new revolution taken VOL. XIII.-Westminster Review.

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May Laurinary emessa murst over our heads. This ingen vise tangerous scutum vit of zom prevents us from thewing it arg; dis gim, fivitet n minuns mi interests, and become the theatre of a party, wise niuence. ituugi x aunts deserters from la side, or whether, wie wng a more die opportu Aisy, is may appear wicep, is increasing fully by the very mature of the thing: in France the remitan a resinting; in England the whole position, etlice is tottering: the femocracy, or rather masses of individuala, are in a state of insurrection, and placed in opposition to an inw.ated theme; the bonds of faith, of coedence, and of costom, are konene, avarice and ambition are become the common springs of action: mich, withrait exaggeration, are some of the traits of the picture which Europe at this moment presents to any one who will open his eyes.”— Nederlandsche Gedachten.

The same article further propounds that

The government of the Pays Bas was, and is a monarchy. The sovereign power in the realm belongs to the prince. The king is not the chief of the executive power: he reigns as a sovereign prince, conformably to the laws of the realm. If he has willed the States-general, it was, that the difference of opinions should have a salutary influence. What is the king? He is what the ancient counts were in Holland; he is in Belgium what the emperor of Austria and the king of Spain were-what the Stadtholders would have been but for ingratitude and ambition.'

We may add: Nous avons changé tout cela.

The case of Belgian grievances is as clear as the sun in an unclouded day; and the sympathies of the English people will be on the side of the oppressed. We cannot distinctly see a straight-forward course for freedom and good government in the present involved state of the Belgian question. Every act of the king of the Netherlands fills us with disquiet and distrust. He never did justice to the Belgian people when they were at his

feet, in prostrate submission; he never held the scale of equal law between his northern and his southern subjects, when Belgium brought to him her cheerful willing homage; and is it likely now, exasperated as he is against what, in his message to the States-general, he has been advised to call "rebellion;" now, surrounded by Dutch councils, which foster and fan every Batavian prejudice, both political and religious, against the malcontents of the south-is it likely now, that he should play the part of a patriot king. The States-general, in which the Belgians are so unfairly represented, assembled in the Dutch capital, surrounded by Dutch troops, and immediately under the eye of the king and of the court, will do no justice to the aggrieved parties. Thus much we may safely foretel. The probability is, that the wound will be plastered over; but it can only be healed by the separation of Belgium from Holland; a separation, at all events, on all matters of administration and finance. This separation may for the moment be opposed, it may be delayed, but it is inevitable; and if it come not in the quietude of calm discussion, it will come in the thunder-storm of another revolution.. Holland would do well to take to herself the grace and the glory of recognizing, of meeting the Belgian will. If she do not, she is only industriously sowing what will bring her a harvest of sorrows. If now," while it is called today," the claims, the most reasonable claims of the men of Belgium are recognized, the world will be well satisfied to see the Belgian and Batavian sceptres wielded by the House of Orange; but if wrongs are to be unredressed, if the fetters of slavery are to be rivetted upon the necks of millions, whether by the force of arms or the fraud of kings, our hopes and our efforts for Belgium will take another direction; and those flagitious contracts-of which the Union of Belgium with Holland was one, those flagitious contracts, which transferred nations from monarch to monarch, with less ceremony than if they had been stocks or stones, must undergo a more searching, a more vigorous interrogatory.

ART. IX.—Travels to the Seat of War in the East, through Russia and the Crimea, in 1829; with Sketches of the Imperial Fleet and Army, Personal Adventures, and Characteristic Anecdotes. By Captain James Edward Alexander, (late) 16th Lancers, K.L.S. M.R.O. Cor. Mem. S. A. E. and M. G. S. Author of Travels in Ava, Persia, and Turkey. London. 1830. Colburn and Bently. 2 vols. 8vo.

WE do not pretend to know what all these letters mean, with which Captain Alexander has graced his name since he favoured us with his portrait, prefixed to his volume on Ava; but, being interpreted, no doubt, they would turn out very much to his credit. There is every evidence to prove him a most deserving young officer, an enthusiast in his profession, and one likely, in time to come, to distinguish himself by wielding other instruments than pen and pencil. His zeal to improve himself in his profession, led him to encounter the difficulties presented in the way of a traveller through Russia to the Seat of War; and to brave all the dangers from plague, pestilence, and famine, when arrived there: we say nothing of sudden death, for a soldier makes up his account for that when it arrives; but that the hardships and annoyances of such warfare as that here described should be voluntarily undergone for the sake of improvement, strikes us at least as a mark of great zeal on his part, and a claim upon the attention of his superiors.

Besides giving us rare and curious notices of the military condition of Russia, the author mixed much with the society of the country, and spoke some Russian: his notices of the manners and morals of the people are, on the whole, favourable; and are, at least, invariably written in good humour: for he seems not to have permitted either cold, heat, or hunger, to affect his temper, and to have adopted the Russian officer's maxim, Nichavo, ya soldat; "its nothing, I am a soldier." Goodhumour combined with curiosity make a good traveller, and it seems that our author adopted another Russian rule, “go every where till you are stopped." He was rewarded, for he saw a great deal, and as a pair of epaulets are a universal passport in Russia, he was seldom "stopped:" indeed if we may judge from some of his anecdotes, like "Goosy Goosy Gander, he went up stairs, and down stairs, and into my Lady's Chamber;" and on one occasion, he was actually taken "by the left leg and thrown down stairs," by an infuriated husband six feet high and upwards. He tells the story of a friend indeed, but we are not to be deceived by his inverted commas; the warmth of the

narrator, and the quotations from Moore and Byron, to whom he is so partial, tell a different tale. Besides, do we not remember the comely youth of the frontispiece to the Travels in Ava; and does not every page speak of the beauty of his lancer's irresistible uniform: it or he won even the heart of a postmaster's wife in the Ukraine. His wife came up to me, and slily put her hand in mine, and asked me to take a glass of votki in her room, to keep out the cold. I merely tasted it, to please her." Modest lancer of the 16th!

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We must do captain Alexander the justice to say, that it is not his own uniform alone about which he is particular, for he has described and criticised with infinite penetration the military dress of every officer and soldier he met with, and with so much minuteness and zeal, that if his title did not stare us in the face, we should naturally take him for a tailor, instead of a soldier, travelling for improvement. We read in some tale, lately, of a Serjeant Honderthonk, who fell in love with a dress-maker at Birmingham, for her attachment to the army: she knew the facings of every regiment that had been quartered in that town for fifteen years. If the Emperor of Russia confers the orders of St. Vladimir on Captain James Edward Alexander, or Yacob Demitrievitch as he was called in Russia, as we expect, it will be chiefly on the score of the attention paid to the Russian facings. He is as particular as a passport, and never omits even a red stitch in a pair of pantaloons: he is singularly great in boots, and swells to magnificence in the description of bullion epaulets, and bearskin caps. We will quote by way of example his audience of the Emperor: who does not see in a moment that the writer, James, the son of Edward, considers the whole scene as a great clothes shop. We have no doubt of the gentility of captain Alexander's lineage, but we should not have been very much surprised at the Russians, seeing his eye constant to the slops, giving him the title of James, the son of Edward, the tailor.

To one of the immense exercise houses, his Imperial Majesty repairs daily in winter, with the grand Duke Michael, to inspect a regiment or an equipage of the fleet. Accordingly, I repaired, in uniform, to the Michaeloffsky exercise house, and found a battalion, a thousand strong, of that splendid regiment, the Seménoffsky, drawn up in three ranks, on one side of the saloon. At one end was a party of the chevalier Gardes in their white jackets and helmets: the other was occupied by a model equipage of the fleet; and the fourth side of the parallelogram was unoccupied.

After having been taken round by a general officer to inspect the troops, who were in the most perfect order, one of the folding doors was thrown open, and the Emperor with his illustrious brother, and a