The House of Brunswick and the Casting Vote.—Sir Arthur Owen, bart., of Orielton, in the county of Pembroke, is the individual who is asserted to have given the casting vote which placed the Brunswick dynasty on the throne of England. A lady, in 1856, residing at Haverfordwest, remembered her grandmother, who was staying at Orielton, at the time when Sir Arthur Owen rode to London on horseback, for the purpose of recording his vote: he arrived at the precise juncture when his single vote caused the scale to preponderate in favour of the descendants of the Electress Sophia. (I. Pavin Phillips, Haverfordwest.—Notes and Queries, 2nd S. No. 31.) Another account, which Mr. Phillips thinks the correct one, states that Sir Arthur Owen made the number even; and that it was Mr. Griffith Rice, M.P. for Carmarthenshire, who gave the casting vote. (See Debrett’s Baronetage, 1824.)
The Discovery of America is referred to by Humboldt as a “wonderful concatenation of trivial circumstances which undeniably exercised an influence on the course of the world’s destiny:”
Washington Irving has justly observed that if Columbus had resisted the counsel of Martin Alonzo Pinzon, and continued to steer westward, he would have entered the Gulf Stream and been borne to Florida, and from thence, probably, to Cape Hatteras and Virginia,—a circumstance of incalculable importance, since it might have been the means of giving to the United States of North America a Catholic Spanish population, in the place of the Protestant English one by which those regions were subsequently colonised. “It seems to me like an inspiration,” said Pinzon to the Admiral, “that my heart dictates to me that we ought to steer in a different direction.” It was on the strength of this circumstance that in the celebrated lawsuit which Pinzon carried on against the heirs of Columbus, between 1513 and 1515, he maintained that the discovery of America was alone due to him. This inspiration Pinzon owed, as related by an old sailor of Moguez, at the same trial, to the flight of a flock of parrots which he had observed in the evening flying towards the south-west, in order, as he might well have conjectured, to roost on trees on the land. Never has a flight of birds been attended by more important results. It may even be said that it has decided the first colonization in the New Continent, and the original of the Roman and Germanic races of men.
The Act to recharter the first Bank of the United States was defeated by the casting vote of Vice-president Clinton (ex-officio President of the Senate), and the Tariff Act of 1846 was ordered to be engrossed by the casting vote of Vice-president Dallas.
That the Past is the Guide for the Present is thus argued:—Every political treatise referring to events which have engrossed the attention of the day, either as modifications or as changes of our social system, must be valuable in later years. It must necessarily recommend or condemn measures on account of their probable operation in the time to come; it must in some degree be a prophecy, or else it is practically worthless. The politician studies the past merely as his guide for the future. If he is learned, wise, and at all an adept in the science which he professes—than which no other is of so momentous an import—he will consider past history as the barometer which must guide him in predicating the approach either of a tempest or a calm. Temporary clamour or occasional obstruction will not lead him to forsake clear principles of action, or to recommend a grand constitutional remedy in the case of a trifling local disease. He must look forward beyond the sphere of immediate action—resolute in this belief, that one false step, however small, may upset the equilibrium of the State.—Blackwood’s Magazine, 1850.
Great Britain on the Map of the World.
We see two little spots huddled up in a corner, awkwardly shot off to a side, as it were, yet facing the great sea, on the very verge of the great waste of waters, with nothing to protect them: not like Greece, or Italy, or Egypt, in a Mediterranean bounded by a surrounding shore, to be coasted by timid mariners, but on the very edge and verge of the great ocean, looking out westward to the expanse. If she launch at all, she must launch with the fearless heart that is ready to brave old ocean,—to take him with his gigantic western waves—to face his winds and hurricanes—his summer heats of the dead-still tropics—his winter blasts—his fairy icebergs—his fogs like palpable darkness—his hail-blasts and his snow. Britain has done so. From her island-home, she has sailed east and west, north and south. She has gone outwardly, and planted empires. The States themselves, now her compeer, were an offshoot from her island territory. Her destiny is to plant out nations, and the spirit of colonization is the genius that presides over her career. She plants out Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Cape. Ceylon and the Mauritius she occupies for trade. India she covers with a network of law, framed and woven in her Anglo-Saxon loom. She clutches China, and begins at last to break up the celestial solecism. She lays hold of Borneo, and straightway piratical prahus are seen wrecked and stranded on the shore, or blown to fragments in the air. She raises an impregnable fortress at the entrance of the Mediterranean, and another in its centre, as security to her sea-borne trade. She does the same in embryo at the entrance to the Red Sea. Westward from Newfoundland, she traverses a continent, and there, in the Pacific, Vancouver’s Island, which may one day become the New Great Britain of new Anglo-Saxon enterprise, destined to carry civilization to the innumerable islands of the great sea—bears the union-jack for its island banner, and acknowledges the sovereignty of the British Crown. At Singapore, she has provisionally made herself mistress of the Straits of Malacca; and thousands of miles away on the other hand, at the Falkland Islands, near to the Land of Fire, the British mariner may hear the voice of praise issuing in the Anglo-Saxon tongue. In addition to this, she has representatives at every court, and consuls at every sea-port. Her cruisers bear her flag on every navigable sea. Europeans, Asiatics, Africans, Americans, and Australians, are found wearing her uniform, eating her bread, bearing her arms, and contributing to extend her dominion.—North British Review.
Ancient and Modern London.
It is interesting, beyond a merely antiquarian point of view, to trace the progress of London from a walled town, covering about 700 acres, with a population half mercantile, half military, living in a labyrinth of courts and alleys, the majority being, as appears from an old proclamation, “heaped up together, and in a sort, half smothered.” Let us compare this with the majestic city of our day, spreading over more than 120 square miles, and containing 2600 miles of streets, flanked by 360,000 inhabited houses, with a population of 3,000,000, and an assessed rental of 13,000,000l.
Modern London embraces important portions of the four adjacent counties, and has swallowed up not only the old district, which is still designated “the City,” and its ancient suburbs, but numberless places formerly existing as distinct towns, villages, and hamlets, which in days gone by had their separate systems of local government. Under the present regulations, the Central Criminal Court district extends over an area of more than 700 square miles, including all Middlesex, and parts of Surrey, Kent, Essex, and Hertfordshire; which is also about the area of the Metropolitan Police District.—Alexander Pulling; Law Magazine, N.S., No. xxviii.