may be remedied.

MOTION FOR REFORM.

On the 15th of June Sir Francis Burdett made a motion for a sweeping
parliamentary reform. Nearly all the country gentlemen had left town,
and those that remained were generally disinclined to enter upon this
momentous question. On a division, therefore, Sir Francis was outvoted
by seventy-four against fifteen. His scheme of reform divided itself
into three parts: by the first article it was proposed that all
freeholders, householders, and others, who paid direct taxes to the
state, the church, or the poor, should have votes; by the second, that
a convenient division of places entitled to send representatives to
parliament should be marked out, each division be again subdivided, and
each subdivision to return one member, the elections being conducted in
the several parishes in one day; and by the third, that the duration of
parliaments should be reduced to the period of time most agreeable to
the British constitution. The merits of this scheme may have been great;
but one thing is certain, that the period at which it was introduced
was not the proper one for its consideration. This forms the best excuse
which can be made for the defence of manifest abuses made by such men as
Perceval and Canning, and who said they saw no reason whatever to enter
upon the subject of reform. There was evident reason for taking this
subject into consideration; but while the nation was engaged in a
contest for its national existence, it would have been unwise to have
tampered with the machinery of government; especially as that machinery
was acknowledged by all parties to work well for the prosecution of the
arduous contests in which we were engaged with Napoleon and his allies.

PROROGATION OF PARLIAMENT.

The session closed on the 21st of June, when the speech from the throne
was again delivered by commission. It dwelt chiefly upon the resistance
of Spain against the tyranny of the French government, and upon the
successes which had recently crowned the arms of the Emperor of Austria,
under the conduct of the Archduke Charles.

AFFAIRS OF SPAIN.

After the battle of Corunna, the cause of Spain seemed wholly lost. The
Austrian war, however, which broke out when Napoleon was in pursuit
of Sir John Moore, operated as a grand diversion, favourable for the
Peninsula, inasmuch as it distracted his attention, and obliged him to
withdraw his imperial guards from Spain, and prevented hi