"Him, too, you occasionally tyrannise over; and with bad result to yourselves among others; using the leather in a tyrannous, unnecessary manner; withholding, or scantily furnishing, the oats and ventilated stabling that are due. Rugged horse-subduers, one fears they are a little tyrannous at times. 'Am I not a horse, and _half_-brother?' To remedy which, so far as remediable, fancy--the horses all 'emancipated;' restored to their primeval right of property in the grass of this Globe; turned out to graze in an independent supply-and-demand manner! So long as grass lasts, I daresay they are very happy, or think themselves so. And Farmer Hodge sallying forth, on a dry spring morning, with a sieve of oats in his hand, and agony of eager expectation in his heart, is he happy? Help me to plough this day, Black Dobbin; oats in full measure if thou wilt. 'Hlunh! No--thank!' snorts Black Dobbin; he prefers glorious liberty and the grass. Bay Darby, wilt not thou perhaps? 'Hlunh!' Gray Joan, then, my beautiful broad-bottomed mare,--O Heaven! she too answers Hlunh! Not a quadruped of them will plough a stroke for me. Corn-crops are ended in this world!--For the sake, if not of Hodge, then of Hodge's horses, one prays this benevolent practice might now cease, and a new and a better one try to begin. Small kindness to Hodge's horses to emancipate them! The fate of all emancipated horses is, sooner or later, inevitable. To have in this habitable earth no grass to eat,--in black Jamaica gradually none, as in White Connemara already none;--to roam aimless, wasting the seed-fields of the world; and be hunted home to Chaos, by the dire watch-dogs and dire hell-dogs, with such horrors of forsaken wretchedness as were never seen before! These things are not sport; they are terribly true, in this country at this hour."
One other sham, perhaps the greatest which our age has witnessed, Mr Carlyle accidentally denounces--we mean the late Colonial policy. If the Whigs have an official aptitude for anything, it is the coopering up of Constitutions. Is one colony indignant at some outrage or insult proceeding from headquarters--is another dissatisfied with the conduct of the Governor, and urgent for his recall--is a third aggrieved by the commercial vacillation and fiscal measures of a Parliament in which it has neither voice nor power--the universal panacea is, Give them a Constitution! We hope the present Ministry will profit by the following criticism--not volunteered by us, who neither look upon them with affection, nor entertain any sanguine hope of their conversion to a patriotic policy,--but penned by a writer who, not long ago, was considered by their organs as one of the deepest thinkers of the age.