and bloodless machines at an age when otherwise they would be at play before the cottage doors of their parents; to augment indefinitely the proportion of those who enjoy the profit of the labour of others as compared with those who exercise this labour."

Hence has arisen a new aristocracy, having its basis in fraud as the old aristocracy had its basis in force.† The object of all enlightened legislation and administration is to enclose within the narrowest practicable limits the class of drones. The effect of the financial impostures of the modern rulers of England has been to increase the number of drones. In addition to the aristocracy of great landowners and merchants, who possess "a certain generosity and refinement of manners. and opinions which, although neither philosophy nor virtue, has been that acknowledged substitute for them, which at least is a religion, which makes respected those venerable names," there has come into existence an aristocracy of "attorneys, excisemen, directors, government pensioners, usurers, stock-jobbers, with their dependants and descendants."

"These are a set of pelting wretches, in whose employment there is nothing to exercise, even to their distortion, the more majestic forces of the soul. Though at the bottom it is all trick, there is something frank and magnificent in the chivalrous disdain of infamy of a gentleman. There is something to which-until you see through the base falsehood upon which all inequality is founded— it is difficult for the imagination to refuse its respect in the faithful and direct dealings of the substantial merchant. But in the habits and lives of this new aristocracy, created out of an increase in public calamities, whose existence must be terminated with their termina

Shelley advises his readers to study Cobbett's "Paper Against Gold."

+ In his translation of Goethe's "May-Day Night" scene from Faust Shelley adds a note to the name of the speaker entitled "Parvenu"-" A sort of fundholder.”

tion, there is nothing to qualify our disapprobation. They eat and drink and sleep, and in the intervals of these actions they cringe and lie."

It is these who, by requiring mediocrity in books, poison literature; their hopes and fears are of the narrowest description; their domestic affections are feeble, and beyond the domestic affections they have

none.

Meanwhile the toil and misery of the poor increase. For fourteen hours' labour they receive the price of seven. They eat less bread, wear worse clothes, are more ignorant, immoral, miserable, and desperate." If they believe that the same immutable God rules the next world who also rules this, what must their outlook be! 'The gleams of hope which speak of Paradise seem, like the flames of Milton's Hell, only to make darkness. visible, and all things take their colour from what surrounds them."

The choice for England is between reform, or insurrection, or a military despotism. What, then, is the

reform that we desire ?

"A writer [Malthus] . . . has stated that the evils of the poor arise from an excess of population, and that after they have been stript naked by the tax-gatherer and reduced to bread and tea and fourteen hours of hard labour by their masters, after the frost has bitten their defenceless limbs, and the damp driven disease into their bones, and the suppressed revenge of hunger stamped the ferocity of want like the mark of Cain upon their countenance, the last tie by which Nature holds them to benignant earth, whose plenty is garnered up in the strongholds of their tyrants, is to be divided; that the single alleviation of their sufferings and their scorns, the one thing which made it impossible to degrade them below the beasts, which amid all their crimes and miseries yet separated a cynical and unmanly contamination, an anti-social

cruelty from all the soothing and elevating and harmonizing gentleness of the sexual intercourse, and the humanizing charities of domestic life, which are its appendages-that this is to be obliterated."

The reform according to Malthus is not the reform desired by Shelley. What, then, is that reform? Before aspiring after theoretical perfection in the State, we must possess, he says, the advantages of which nations are at present susceptible. To abolish the national debt; to disband the standing army; to abolish tithes, due regard being had to vested interests; to grant complete freedom to thought and its expression; to render justice cheap, speedy, and secure these measures, Shelley believed, would together constitute a reform which we might accept as sufficient for a time. Filled as he was with boundless hopes for the future, these demands for the present seemed to him reasonable and moderate.

"The payment of the principal of what is called the National Debt, which it is pretended is so difficult a problem, is only difficult to those who do not see who are the creditors, and who the debtors, and who the wretched sufferers from whom they both wring the taxes." In truth the nation is not the debtor; the debt was contracted not by the nation towards a portion of it, but by the whole mass of the privileged classes towards one particular portion of those classes. It is this which is the cause of our misery-the unjust distribution, surreptitiously made under the form of the National Debt, of the products of the labour of England.

"The National Debt was chiefly contracted in two liberticide wars undertaken by the privileged classes of the country; the first for the purpose of tyrannizing over one portion of their subjects;

the second in order to extinguish the resolute spirit of attaining their rights in another. The labour which this money represents, and that which is represented by the money wrung for purposes of the same detestable character out of the people since the commencement of the American War, would, if properly employed, have covered our land with monuments of architecture exceeding the sumptuousness and the beauty of Egypt and Athens: it might have made every peasant's cottage a little paradise of comfort, with every convenience desirable in [word undeciphered],—neat tables and chairs, and good beds, and a collection of useful books ; and our fleet, manned by sailors well-paid and well-clothed, might have kept watch round this glorious island against the less enlightened nations which assuredly would have envied its prosperity. But the labour which is expressed by these sums has been diverted from these purposes of human happiness to the promotion of slavery, or the attempt at dominion; and a great portion of the sum in question is debt and must be paid."

The payment of the interest falls chiefly on those who had no hand in the creation of the debt, and who are sufferers from the transactions in which the money was spent; and this tax is wrung from them in order to maintain in luxury and indolence the public debtors. It is commonly said that the National Debts were contracted by all classes of the nation for defence against a common danger, and for the vindication of the rights and liberties of posterity, and therefore that posterity should bear the burden of payment. This reasoning is most fallacious; the debts were largely contracted to carry on wars of revenge, of jealousy, and of ambition. The whole property of the nation is mortgaged for the so-called National Debt; to use the language of the law, let the mortgage foreclose. One of the first acts of a reformed Government would undoubtedly be an effectual scheme for compelling the debtors and credi

tors, that is, the privileged classes as a whole, and a certain portion of those classes, to compromise the debt between themselves. Tribunals would be appointed to consider and decide upon the claims of every fundholder.* There are two descriptions of property, the holders of which are entitled to two very different measures of forbearance and regard.

"Labour, industry, economy, skill, genius, or any similar powers honourably and innocently exerted, are the foundations of one description of property. All true political institutions ought to defend every man in the exercise of his discretion with respect to property so acquired. . . . But there is another species of property which has its foundation in usurpation, or imposture, or violence; without which, by the nature of things, immense aggregations of property could never have been accumulated. Of this nature is the principal part of the property enjoyed by the aristocracy and by the great fundholders, the majority of whose ancestors never either deserved it by their skill and talents or created it by their personal labour."

If

Claims to property of this latter kind should be compromised under the supervision of public tribunals. Shelley advocates confiscation, it is just to remember that he did not write as one of the greedy have-nots, but as heir to a large aggregation of wealth, which he was prepared to forfeit.

Such, then, would be the action of a reformed Parliament with reference to the National Debt. But what is meant by a reform of Parliament? Doubtless, from an abstract point of view, universal sufferage is desirable and right; but abstractedly other and greater changes are also right-the abolition of monarchy and aristocracy, the levelling of inordinate wealth, and an agrarian

*I am not quite certain that I understand aright Shelley's proposal.