blessings which they have in store for the working-classes, it is something very different from what they either promised or professed.

But, says Lord John Russell, we could not proceed against the leaders of the Convention, because we had little hope of obtaining a conviction before juries, however clearly the bench might lay down that the accused had been guilty of sedition or high treason; and, therefore, we deemed it better to let the evil go on growing till it reached such a height as to strike a panic into the middle classes, and secure their co-operation in the execution of the law. We admit the validity of this excuse-probably it was expedient, and even necessary in the present state of the country, and misled as the public mind has been by political falsehood, incessantly rung into their ears for a quarter of a century, to adopt such a course, how adverse soever to every principle of jus

tice. But what inference is to be drawn

as to the soundness or tendency of the political principles which have so long been poured into the middle classes, when the avowed effect of them by the Liberal Government is to render the administration of justice impracticable, and proclaim a long impunity to crimes involving a nation's ruin? What, has it already come to this, that treason must be pampered in America till its plains are reddened by the light of its burning villages, and that sedition must be winked at in England till the minds of the middle classes are illuminated by the flames of Birmingham, or the conflagration of Bristol? Is this the vast and incalculable progress of human intelligence? Is this the manner in which the middle classes have been educated under the Whig tuition of thirty, and the Whig Administration of ten years, for the great work of self government? Is this the specimen to which we are to look for an example of the manner in which the great duties of the State are to be discharged by the operative ranks? Must we always wait till cities are burned, and streets given up to pillage, before any defensive measures are adopted by the new governors of the State? Do coming events never cast their shadows before to the dominant shopocracy of the empire; and will the new governors of the State never adopt any defensive or

vigorous step till their doors are forced open by a Chartist mob, their houses in flames by Chartist torches, or their beer-barrels emptied by Chartist mouths? Doubtless, when a Radical finds a Chartist swallowing copious libations out of his butts, the obstructions of error are quickly swept away from his own mind; when he sees his property pillaged by Chartist hands, he gets a clear insight into the distinction betwixt meum and tuum; and when the darkness is illuminated by the flames of his burning property, the shades of political delusion are rapidly dispelled. But are we to rest in the miserable and degrading conclusion, that these deplorable catastrophes must ensue before the middle classes can be roused to a sense either of their duties or their danger? Is the book of experience entirely lost upon them; and is there no way of making them discharge their duties as jurymen, or support the Government as politicians, but by bringing the horrors of civil war home to their doors? Is that the result of ten years' apprenticeship to self-government ? Is that the consequence of the extension of the suffrage, and the diffusion of political information to all classes of society? If these are the consequences of political amelioration, if these are the first fruits of Reform, we can only say that they exceed in bitterness any which the Tories ever predicted; and that the libel pronounced upon the middle classes by Lord John Russell as his excuse for not stifling sedition in its cradle, exceeds any that was ever launched against them by their bitterest political opponent.

But the truth is, that this memorable declaration of Lord John Russell suggests matter for deeper and more serious reflections. Under the old Constitution of England, no such difficulty of administering justice as he so forcibly points out, was experienced. Juries then fearlessly and honestly discharged themselves of their oaths; judges deliberately tried cases without the dread that the law would be thwarted by those intrusted with the evidence; Government acted vigorously without an apprehension that their weapons would be broken when wielded by their arm; sedition was prevented from ripening into treason, and treason from involving provinces in the pains of rebellion. What is it, then, that has wrought so fearful a change in the temper and judgment of the people, as their admitted disinclination to administer justice or act with decision necessarily implies? Is it that the public mind has become so de bauched and corrupted by the incessant promulgation of Liberal principles, that, till a fatal catastrophe arises, the bonds of society are loosened, the obligation of oaths forgotten, and the sense of justice in the middle classes extinguished? Is it that the exercise of political power is destructive to the sense of political duties; that, in proportion as men are intrusted with self-government, they become insensible to its obligations; that, as political discussion is more largely entrusted to the working-classes, public sympathy will be more largely bestowed upon the violators of the law and the disturbers of public tranquillity; and that the boasted dreams of political regenerators are at length to terminate in a demonstra tion on the greatest scale, that the old position of Hobbes is well-founded, and that the original state of nature was that of general war against life and property? Or are we to rest in the less alarming but not less melancholy conclusion, that the days of British freedom, and the due administration of justice by its unbought citizens, are numbered; that the vehement discussion of public affairs, and the excitement of political passion which now takes place, are inconsistent with the due discharge of their judicial functions by the middle classes; that terror, intimidation, and violence, have rendered the verdicts of juries precarious and suspected, and that the boasted and long-tried institution of juries itself, is a security only against the attacks of the monarch in front, but none against the assaults of the populace in rear? Are we doomed to see the institutions of Alfred melt away under the dissolving liberalism of the nineteenth century; is popular intimidation, political passion, or personal fear, to bring into discredit, in all but times of manifest danger, the ancient institution of trial by jury; and is necessity to force even upon the wisest heads, and warmest hearts, and stoutest patriots of the realm, the deliberate conviction, that the ancient popular administration of government in England, must give place to the powers and

the oppression of a centralized despotism? Is the unpaid juryman in the end to be every where supplanted by the stipendiary judge; the churchwarden by the poor-law commissioner; the parish constable by the paid policeman; the yeomanry by an armedgendarmerie; the militia by a powerful regular army? - And is all this to take place, not only without the opposition, but with the cordial support of every friend to humanity and his country, from the dear-bought but melancholy conviction forced on them by experience, that the days of tempered freedom, and the real administration of public affairs by the people, are past? These are vital and momentous questions. They are questions on which many a thoughtful mind is now ruminating, and which successive events will in all probability erelong present in still clearer colours to the national mind. We mention them without any wish to weaken at this moment the hands of Government, but from a deep sense of their vast and growing importance, and the conviction that it is not by vainly lamenting the past, which is now irrecoverable, but attending to the present and altered features of society which it has induced, that the great end of government, security to life and property, is in this country hereafter to be obtained.

Mr Buller lately said in the House of Commons, that the Government of the country was now, for the first time, brought in contact with the educated masses, and that they would now find what it was to contend with the working-classes, whom the system of Bell and Lancaster had elevated to a knowledge of their rights. Lord John Russell, in the same debate, (August 2,1839,) said, that the state of society which pervaded the operative classes in almost all the manufacturing districts in the empire, was deplorable in the extreme; that they had obtained education, without any provision being made for either their moral or religious instruction; and that they are now banded together in a confederacy which must be numbered, not by its hundreds of thousands, but by its millions, the object of which is, by force, intimidation, and violence, to obtain a total change in the Constitution of the country. Both statements, so far as they go, are correct; the wide spread of mere intellectual education, and the total absence of moral or religious tuition, are undoubtedly two of the elements in the composition of the perils with which the social system of Great Britain is now so widely overspread. Add to these "the enormous lying" by which Mr Bulwer tells us the Reform Bill was carried the political delusion, exaggeration, and error, so copiously poured into the nation by the whole Whig journalists, orators, and writers, for the last thirty years-joined to the excessive expectations wilfully excited in the mind of the country, for selfish purposes, by the authors of the Reform Bill, which is the real cause of the distracted and discontented state of so large a portion of the working-classes throughout the manufacturing dis

tricts.

What is the prevailing cry of the Chartists and Universal Suffrage men? It is, that they have not obtained the fruits of Reform; that they have been misled and deceived by their Whig leaders; that all the real and practical grievances of which they formerly complained, are still in existence; that wages are as low, provisions as high, taxes as heavy as ever; that the sway of the middle classes has proved more oppressive than even that of the old boroughmongers; and that the New Poor-Law has deprived them of their rights of birthright inheritance in away which would never have been attempted by the ancient guardians of the realm. What they call for, therefore, is Universal Suffrage, Annual Parliaments, a paid Legislature; in other words, the total command of the property, education, and intelligence of the kingdom. What they would do with these powers when acquired, is now sufficiently evident. They would pillage all the property of the kingdom, and divide the whole possessions of the wealthy classes among themselves. Now, to what is this monstrous cupidity and insatiable desire for power, with a view to pillage, to be ascribed? Clearly to the exaggerated expectations and unbounded promises held forth by the Whigs during the Reform agitation, and to the strenuous efforts which they have ever since made to prevent any extension of the religious institutions of the country. They told them during the Reform mania, at every public dinner, at every public meet

ing, and on every hustings in the kingdom and the statements were repeated till the very air rang with the sounds-that their whole sufferings were owing to the Tories and the boroughmongers; that the Reform Bill would at once relieve the whole distresses of the country; that taxes would be reduced, wages high, provisions abundant; and that, instead of Government acting as heretofore, merely for the interest of the few and the oppression of the many, it would be directed solely to the interests of the many, and the restraining of the few; that the reign of corruption would be at an end, and that justice, patriotism, and disinterestedness, were to pervade every part of the administration. When, therefore, instead of the fulfilment of these exaggerated expectations, the people, seven years after the Reform Bill was passed, found every thing going on much the same as before, with this difference only, that political abuses are far more frequent than ever; that commissions, prolific of advantage only to the Whig employés, which in the end lead to nothing, abound in all quarters; that the revenue is sinking while the expenditure is continually increasing; and that the blessings of moral and political economy have been brought home to the working-classes in the shape of the New Poor-Law Bill; it is noways surprising that universal discontent has been awakened amongst the highly excited operative classes; and that, in utter despair at the total failure of the grand nostrum which was to have worked out their salvation, they have listened to leaders who tell them that nothing remains but to take the administration of public affairs into their own hands, and throw overboard at once the whole property, respectability, and education of the kingdom. They had no difficulty in finding leaders who would head this new and formidable plebeian movement; the example of the success of former agitation was too instructive to be thrown away. They saw that the Whigs had contrived to keep themselves in office for seven years by Reform agitation; and they saw no reason why, by the aid of a similar movement from an inferior class, the assistance of the Chartist mania, and the terrors of the torch and the dagger, they might not also, in their turn, get possession of the reins of Government, and become masters of the country, and all its property, for seven years to come.

While, however, no one can doubt that the causes which have now been enumerated, are those to which the present alarming social condition of the country is owing, the question remains, How this population is to be dealt with? In what way the existing dangers are to be averted, and the former healthy condition of the public

mind re-established? These are momentous questions, affecting not merely the future fate of the country, but the property and patrimonial interests of every individual in the kingdom. The first thing which must strike every impartial mind in considering the present state of the country, is, that the working-classes have now proved themselves unworthy of that extension of the Suffrage for which they contend; and that, whatever doubts might formerly have existed on the subject in the minds of wellmeaning and enthusiastic, but simple and ill-informed, men, it is now established beyond all doubt, that Universal Suffrage in reality means nothing else but universal pillage. This, we always said, was the case. From first to last we have resolutely maintained, that what the working-classes understand by political power, is just the means of putting their hands in their neighbours' pockets; and that it was the belief that the Reform Bill would give them that power, which was the main cause of the enthusiasm in its favour, and the disgust of the failure of these hopes, the principal reason of the present clamour for an extension of the Suffrage. The Chartists, doubtless, deny this, as all men will do till they can admit it with impunity, and as the French Revolutionists did till they had acquired, by Universal Suffrage, the power of breaking into and pillaging every chateau in the kingdom. But how do their acts correspond with these professions? They had the mastery at Birmingham for an hour and a-half, and immediately two houses were burned and thirty gutted. If they had the command of the empire for a month and a-half, they would confiscate, and share among themselves, all the property it

contains.

But it is not necessary to have recourse to this memorable instance,

divulging the secret designs of the Chartists, to arrive at a just conclusion as to their total unfitness for any of the functions of Government, and of the enormous peril with which any concession of power to them, however small, will be attended. The same conclusion arises, in an equally forcible manner, from a consideration of their ordinary habits, and the principles by which their private conduct is regulated. What are the qualities of

mind and character which fit men for the discharge of public or political duties, and the prevalence of which in a nation renders them ripe for a share in the administration of the realm? Economy, order, and foresight in the management of their private affairs; regularity and prudence in private life; the bettering of their circumstances, and the elevation of their habits, by the continued practice of industry, frugality, and foresight.

What, then, are the habits of the middle classes, to whom, in so great a proportion, political power has been handed over by the Reform Bill ? That there are many extravagant, fraudulent, and profligate characters among them, may safely be admitted; and that a majority of the ten-pound electors in almost all the great cities in the empire, are possessed of little or no property, and belong to a class unfit to be intrusted with political power, may be considered as now com.pletely proved by experience. But, nevertheless, there unquestionably exists among the middle classes more prudence, foresight, and economy; more patient industry and unobtrusive virtue; morestrenuous exertion, and heroic selfdenial, than in any other class in the community. We shall find no parallel to it either in the ranks above or beneath them in society. The former, by the possession of hereditary fortune or influence, are in great part relieved from the necessity of constant labour, or the duties of prospective foresight. The latter are so much habituated to attend only to present objects, and to receive impressions only from what strikes the senses, that they have never acquired these habits at all. It was upon the known and admitted prevalence of these qualities among the better portion of the middle classes, and the assertion that such habits were universal among that body of men, that the main argument in favour of the extension of the suffrage in their favour was founded. And unquestionably, if they all possessed the foresight and self-denial which is every day manifested by a considerable part of their number, political power could not be entrusted to safer or better hands. No Government will ever be endangered in which the majority of the representative constituency are holders of policies of life insurance, proportioned to the circumstances of their respective families. The main. tenance of such insurances implies a sacrifice of enjoyment to duty; of the present to the future; of selfish to social affection, which forms the best possible preparation for the due exercise of political functions.

Are then the habits of the workingclasses, above all, of the manufacturing operatives in great cities, such as to afford any well-grounded expectation that they are better qualified than the middle classes for the duty of electing legislators? Observe the conduct of the better description of the middle ranks, and say, whether the conduct of the manufacturing artisan at all resembles it, or is not rather a contrast to it. Look at the professional men the lawyers, physicians, clergymen, merchants, shopkeepers, and manufacturers. What efforts do they make to raise themselves in the world? What industry do they exert, what frugality do they exercise? Their whole life is one, not merely of continual exertion, but of incessant foresight, and anxious consideration of the future. Their hard-earned gains are for the most part invested either in profitable speculations, or devoted to life insurances, intended to serve as a provision for their families after they themselves shall be no more. Existence to them is an incessant scene of toilsome exertion and of virtuous self-denial. Frugality and foresight pervade every part of their establishment; their whole life is a sacrifice of the present to the future. It is in their industry and frugality that the foundation is laid for almost all the wealth and prosperity of society. It is in their multitude and opulence that Great Britain finds both the sources of its greatness, and its proud pre-eminence over every other country of the globe.

Now, what are the habits of the operative classes, especially in the

manufacturing districts and great towns, and what proof have they afforded by their sobriety, frugality, and foresight, that they possess the habits and qualities essential to a due appreciation or administration of public affairs? Is their conduct characterised by temperance, sobriety, and regularity of demeanour? Are they prudent, cautious, and foreseeing in their habits? Do they generally resist temptation, and forego present enjoyment for the sake of ultimate advantage to themselves or their families? Is capital accumulating in their hands? Are the numbers of them who are thrown upon the parish from destitution diminishing? And have they evinced, by the prudence with which they regulate their own passions, and coerce their own excesses, that they are adequate to the duties of selfgovernment? Above all, is the brutal and debasing habit of intoxication diminishing? Are ale-houses, and gin-shops, and spirit-cellars, every where decreasing in numbers; and does the increase of booksellers' shops in the manufacturing towns, prove that the artisans are withdrawing from the habits of sensual indulgence, to bestow their extra gains upon mental cultivation and moral improvement? Is the attendance in any church, whether Established or Voluntary, increasing amongst them; and does the rapid growth and permanent supportofplaces of worship, prove that their desire for spiritual improvement keeps pace with their spiritual destitution? morality of the sexes improving? Are cases of bastardy, desertion of children by parents, or of wives by husbands, declining in number; and is the fatal gangrene of illicit indulgence giving way before the resolute efforts of a prudent and reflecting people? Questions of this sort force themselves upon the mind when the workingclasses of the manufacturing towns unite in a loud and menacing demand for political power; and, we naturally ask ourselves, what proof have these people given by their conduct in their own sphere of life, and the management of their own affairs, that they are worthy to be raised to more elevated duties, and qualified to direct the affairs of others?

Is the

The answers to these questions are decisive against the claims now advanced for Universal Suffrage. Doubt