themselves but for others. Why, then, is this dream of hostile and selfish union between them and the far niore variant population of the country to frighten us from our propriety?

When it is full and The Reply, as usual,

The Reply, however, says they do not want the suffrage; you are thrusting it upon them. It is the old story. When the voice of a petitioner is calm and low, we cannot hear it. loud, then we 'must not yield to intimidation.' dispenses with the evidence on one side, and excludes it on the other. I cannot wonder that it produces none to sustain the dictum; for there is none. But on the other side, are there no agitators' who are not to be ducked'? Is there not a Press that gives utterance to the voice of Labour, and is not that utterance pretty plain? Are there not from year to year great, though perfectly peaceable, meetings, attended, and that even from a distance, by thousands who can ill afford it? Has not Exeter Hall been filled by, and in the interest of, the rural labourers, last season, under the presidency of Mr. Bright? There are at least two members of Parliament who are, in a special sense, the representatives of the working men; and their voice is in utter contradiction to the assurances so confidently given by the member for the University of London.

And now as to the demand that is made on us for an instance of a country flourishing and contented where the suffrage is general. Were we to refer to a small country, the answer would not unfairly be that we could not argue from it to a large one. Let us turn then, as the Reply turns, to America. And what is here the impeachment? First, a strike, which was not comparable in extent to some English strikes, under the ten pound suffrage, within the memory of our own generation; and which has ended. Secondly, a civil war brought about, strangely enough, by the action of those among the States associated, in which the right of representation, belonging to the populations numerically, was, under the slave system, given over exclusively to the whites. In the North, the war never was a question of class. All classes were alike intent upon it: and the Reply, which dares all that can be dared by those of woman born, does not make bold to state that if the suffrage had been limited after its own heart, that limitation would have made the smallest difference. What, on the other hand, can America say for her Constitution? That, throughout her vast territory, there is not a man who is not loyal to it. That, in her legislation, the public interest is always preferred to the small interests of class; yet that under it all classes live in habitual harmony. That, whatever may be said of the repulsion of the best citizens from public life, there is no State in the world the affairs of which, foreign and domestic, are transacted with an ability more effective; perhaps we in England have reason to say, more drastic. That, in its hour of agony, that Constitution was put under a strain at the least as severe as any recorded in history, and that it

came through that strain unhurt. And this though America does not possess by any means the same advantages which we happily enjoy, in the recollections of history, in the landmarks of usage, and in the lessons of tradition.

Still less happy, if less happy there can be, is the reference to France. For in that country we have lately seen order menaced, and a constitution violently strained, by those who are hostile to the extended suffrage; but on the other hand, with a rare self-command and a noble temperance, that order kept in safety, and that constitution in balance, by the advocates of wide public liberty. After weeks of agonising suspense, at length the end has come. Not a hand was raised to strike, even for freedom; not a word was spoken, that could stir even the least patient into action; and France, rich in every other distinction, but long so slow to make ground in her political education, has achieved a bloodless victory as remarkable, in the peaceful annals of the world, as the most splendid of all her successes on the battle-field can ever be in military history. With the bravery of a defeated Osman Pasha, the head of the State has frankly owned the facts, and has promised, in his message to the Legislature, that the end of this crisis shall be the starting-point of a new era, and that all the public powers shall cooperate in promoting its development.'

Finally, the Reply claims a perfect right to make every supposition consistent with possibility.' A claim, which might give a meditative man much food for thought. In the first place, if sauce for the goose it is sauce for the gander; and every supposition consistent with possibility may as reasonably be made in the interest of an extended enfranchisement. Let us assume, however, that it is good; good on both sides. But both the author of the Reply and I have been taught at Oxford that probable evidence is the guide of life; the only guide which it commonly affords. I wish, therefore, that the Reply, which lays claim to an eminently practical character, had informed us how, under this license, on each side of disputed questions, to make every supposition consistent with possibility,' the business of life can be carried on. Let us apply it in a few cases. A wife may betray; therefore no one should marry. A friend may deceive; let us renounce all friends. A coachman may break my neck; I never will drive out. A cook may poison me; I will live upon blackberries and acorns. A standing army may put down liberty; let not the House of Commons vote a man. Nor will it avail, in the interest of the Reply, to limit this license of extravagant hypothesis to cases where the evil is grave, and the position defenceless; no evil is graver to a nation than the extinction of its freedom : the wealthy class cannot be more defenceless against the ravages of an invading peasantry, than each member of it is, when, without a qualm, once, twice, or even thrice a day he sits down to table, against his cook. Why does not the Reply adopt at once the outspoken language of Henry the Eighth, who

6

addressed his peasantry as but brutes and inexpert folk,' and say to Lincolnshire labourers now what that very frank sovereign said to them, as Mr. Bright 23 tells us, in 1537: How presumptuous are ye, the rude commons of one shire, and that one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm'?

The truth is, the greatest of all the differences between us is in the point of view from which we examine and approach the question of the suffrage. For me, enfranchisement, in the absence of a reasonable bar, is a good; and is only to be foregone upon proof that it will be accompanied and outweighed by some evil, incident to the form in which it is proposed. For those who share the sentiments of the Reply, if I judge them right, it is an evil, only to be encountered for the sake of escaping some other and yet greater evil. I look to it, as augmenting the sum total of forces enlisted in the nation's interest and placed at the disposal of the State: they, as multiplying the risks and shocks to which all human institutions are exposed. Their idea of a constitution is, that it is a fortress to be gallantly defended by a few; and their idea of a people, that it is a vast army posted round about with hostile intentions, which it is a duty and an honour to resist, as long as resistance can be maintained. We find it easy to decry the political ideas of the ancient Greeks; but those cherished among us are less consistent, and in some respects less rational. They contemplated with acquiescence or approval the evil institution of slavery; but they considered, as the English of a former time considered, that every freeman should have a share in the determination of the laws by which he was to be governed. The spirit of our religion, truly popular as it is, has effaced from our system the very name and idea of the slave; but what if the selfishness of class, inhering in our politics, has prevented us from giving to the idea of freedom that which is its consummation, and to the character of the citizen, in the humbler orders, the amplitude of which it is susceptible? At any rate, as matter of fact, we withhold the boon from that half of our labouring householders which, if a distinction must be drawn, is really and obviously the safer of the two. We withhold it, perhaps with some musty precedents to sustain us, fetched from distant ages and from foreign lands, but not so much as one of them carrying the stamp of true British origin. Failing to find foothold in our history, or within the wide spaces of the probable, we take refuge in the shadowy regions, domos vacuas et inania regna, of all that is consistent with possibility.'

While this claim is being made, and while the present paper is being written, Mr. Joseph Arch appears as a fellow-contributor to this Review, and states, in vigorous language, the grievance of the rural labourer. He feels it keenly, and he puts it strongly. He is not likely then to understate, upon this arena of free speech, the

23 Bright's English History, ii. 406.

wants and wishes of his clients. And what are the portentous demands he makes? More air, more water, more dwellings, weather-proof and accommodated to the purposes of decency and virtue; yet even these by no abstract or communistic standard, only by the extension to the country at large, which he thinks the rural franchise would secure, of the provisions already applied to towns. One, and one only, political proposal, indeed, he makes: it is the alteration of the present laws touching primogeniture and entail; but in this alarming pretension what if it should prove that Mr. Lowe agrees with him?

I earnestly hope that these reiterated accusations of class purpose, hostile to society in general, against the county householders, may once for all be abandoned: were it only for the reason, that they might lead to retaliation. It is not wise to provoke the examination of the history of our Statute Book with a view to ascertain and enumerate the instances in which the narrow and oblique purposes of class have been pursued by Parliaments, in the choice of which the upper orders had it all their own way. Let this question be closed before the adverse critic unrolls the story, under the farmer's eyes, of the substitution of a malt-tax for the older services charged directly on the land; or invites the attention of the labourer to the course of legislation, since the Revolution as well as earlier, upon wages, upon combinations, upon crime, upon army and navy discipline, upon bread. Let bygones be bygones. But bygones they will not be, if ugly phantoms are persistently sent into a field from which it would be too easy finally to drive them by an army of too solid and too sad realities. I have no dreams of a golden age; there will always be more than enough to deplore, more than enough to mend. But let us at least thrust aside the needless difficulty of wanton crimination; and labour, in patience and goodwill towards all, to handle and direct for the best the movement of our time.

W. E. GLADSTONE.

THE

NINETEENTH

CENTURY.

No. XII.-FEBRUARY 1878.

THE PEACE TO COME.

DURING the sanguinary struggle in the East, now (as it is permitted to hope) approaching its close, it has been a social usage to say 'I am for the Russians' or 'I am for the Turks.' It is hardly possible, such are the exigencies of our slight and rapid conversation, to avoid the use of succinct formulæ such as these. But they are most misleading to those who hear and to those who use them. They who ay they are for the Russians, commonly mean that their interest in the struggle is mainly aroused on behalf of the subject races of the Ottoman Empire. They who say they are for the Turks, commonly mean that they are against the Russians. The first of the two catchwords is unfortunate, because it gives their countrymen the impres sion that they desire generally the progress of a Power whose action in European politics has been, as a rule, on the side opposed to English sympathies, and which, apart from any calumnious or any doubtful accusations against it, is loaded with heavy charges not yet refuted in respect particularly to Poland. But the second of the two is more Lufortunate still, and in more ways than one. It seems to associate those who use it with a history and a state of things I need not now top to characterise. Further, it seems to involve the assumption that they have been holding a language, and pursuing a line of conduct, which has been advantageous to the Turks. That claim I or one distinctly and confidently challenge. And I challenge it Consistently. In recommending nearly a year and a half ago what has been termed the bag-and-baggage policy, I used these words:VOL. III.-No. 12.

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