poor have had the right of way for centuries. They invest policemen with powers for proclaiming down the political meetings of thousands. And they revive enactments which forbid more than twenty of their countrymen to sign a petition for a redress of grievances. Setting then.selves up as a class to enforce obedience to law and order upon all other classes, they make law, which ought to be the incorporated morality of society, an oppression, and order which is the security of property and person, the harmony, the beauty, and the sweetness of communities, hateful and not loveable, degrading and not ennobling to men.

But it is in reference to the reason and the conscience of other men, that the selfishness of this class is most odiously displayed. By alliances with various religious and very different sects, they secure for themselves the wealthiest endowments, the cathedrals, and the mitres. Taking advantage of ecclesias. tical convulsions, they seize church lands for their own behoof, though bequeathed by piety and benevolence to Christianity and poverty. The spirit embodied in their treatment of Christianity is, that every church which will not vail the spiritual prerogatives of God and of the soul to their temporal authority and secular interests, must be discredited, persecuted -persecuted to-day by taxation, by spoliation, by disabilities, and by contumelies, and but recently by death, and torture, the scaffold and the stake. The rationale of religious endowments and ecclesiastical taxation, has come in the progress of the selfishness of this supreme class to be, the best payments for those of themselves who do not teach, and the taxation of every body else for receiving their instruction elsewhere; this unjust power, this selfish class, pay their own religious instructors out of the funds of all. A German tradesman invented a way of stamping thoughts on paper, which wonderfully facilitates their circulation, to lessen the darkness and the miseries of men. But this illegitimate power have counteracted with all their might the intelligence and the beneficence of this invention of genius, by excise restrictions on the manufacture of paper, by advertisement duties, by stamp duties, by libel and gagging laws, and especially by bribing servile, and by ruining independent thinkers and writers. The highest right of man is the freedom of the soul; the right of every man to form and to fulfil his convictions respecting all his affairs. Without this, the soul of man is not his own. The vital and the essential idea of all individual culture is, the right of each man to form and to fulfil the theories, industrial, moral, social, or spiritual, by which he is to guide himself in life. This is the first want of all clear spirits. It is in the exercise of this right, that genius discovers and

reveals the ideas which advance man. To give scope for genius, all minds ought to be free. The vital and the essential idea of social progress, is the inworking of the highest ideas into human affairs; and if this process is to go on, all minds must be free. Moral ideas enthroned in reason and governing duties, make up the conscience of a man, which has respect to the will of his all-seeing Creator and Judge. Unless the mind, the reason, the conscience be free, the man is not free, either as regards God or eternity. Yet it Yet it is specially against this highest and most sacred of rights, that the selfishness of the supreme class is displayed. They will not let men be free industriously; for they interpose barriers between labour and its materials. They will not allow men to be free economically, for they restrict the production and the exchanges of commodities. They will not allow the consciences of other men to be free politically, for they either withhold franchises, or try to coerce consciences by means of their property or their gifts. They will not allow the consciences of other men to be free morally, for they exact deference to their conventions and their prejudices. They will not allow the consciences enshrined within the souls of other men to be free spiritually, for they profess to establish religious truth, and demand for it pecuniary support and inward belief. Selfishness which makes the earth barren, selfishness which starves millions, selfishness which creates criminals, selfishness which enters into the soul and dethrones the conscience, these are the works of this Illegitimate Power. When the cry of the victims of this selfishness is heard in the land, they say the fabric of their aggrandisement is the growth of Providence. Christian in profession, pagan in practice, they call themselves the natural superiors of society, and when the immolation of multitudes appals human feelings, piously declare the work of their greed to be the work of God.

But is this supreme selfishness, this disguised paganism, a people? Is this illegitimate power a universal franchise, embodying the interests, the intelligence, the consciences of all? No; all these facts belong to the oligarchical rule of this country at this hour. They are not suspicions against a democracy, they are actual experiences of an aristocracy by us all. Oh! the hypocrisy of the philosophy which, on a suspicion of selfishness, justifies the exclusion of the many, from the right to make the few (convicted by such facts of such selfishness) responsible to all.

On the supposition of an equal distribution of selfishness among all classes of men, the supreme working class could only embody their selfishness in seeking the greatest possible happiness of the most numerous class. The selfishness of all would

prefer all. But we seek not the franchise for a class, but for a people. We ask the vote which elects, which calls to account, which rejects, to protect the millions who are governed, from the thousands who govern, by responsibility. We ask the franchise for all the men of British race in the empire, and especially for seven millions of men in the three kingdoms. We are Conservatives of the people from the selfishness of their rulers. We repudiate class interests, and hate the derisive word 'class.' Millions of men cannot conspire, cannot set up caste pretensions and class conventions. They must always seek the interests of millions.

But they say, the people have neither the education nor the intelligence to fit them for a direct voice or vote, in the making of the laws they are to obey. The population of the three kingdoms consists of seven millions of men who do not know what is good for them. Doubtless, without intelligence votes are little worth. Without the moral and mental qualities needful for electing, for examining, and for rejecting rulers and legislators, the power of making them responsible would be useless. Legislation without wisdom is injurious, and legislation cannot be progressive without genius. When thought upon industrial, moral, or spiritual subjects is practically applied to affairs, it is wisdom. Thought discovering new truths, and new applications of old truths, and applying its discoveries to the good of society, is legislative genius. Indeed, the writers are quite right who give these things a paramount importance in the business of government. Moreover, great intelligence and genius are rarities. The men who have them are never the majority. But a people without them would be an extraordinary thing. If they exist at all, a franchise including every man will find them out. A universal suffrage is the only one which will not exclude any genius, or any wisdom, from the formation of the laws. By this suffrage alone can nations be quite sure of securing for the service of the country, and the benefit of society, the voice of every man whose' wisdom maketh his face to shine.'.

The statutes at large, we are told, consist of thirty thousand folios, containing many acts which secure the aggrandisement of the oligarchy, and some which embody beneficent ideas. Let us trace the grains of gold! By knowing whence the good ideas have come we may learn where to expect them. Religious liberty for instance, the abolition of civil disabilities for religious opinions, is one of these beneficent ideas. From the days of Oliver Cromwell, down to the passing by the House of Commons, and the rejection by the House of Lords, of the Jews' Disabilities Bill, this idea of right has been more and more in

corporated in the statute-book. But when tracing the history of it, to ascertain the men to whom we owe it, we find Philip Nye, and John Goodwin, nonconformist ministers, contending for it in the Westminster assembly of divines, and John Milton, a puritan schoolmaster, spreading it over Europe, on the heavenhued wings of his genius. As for the oligarchy, they persecuted it when it was weak, and hewed it down when it was struggling, and it was only by becoming victorious over them, that religious liberty made them the clerks who have written it upon a few of the folios of the statute-book. Take another beneficent idea as an example, the conviction that man ought not to hold property in man. One day, by the side of a road which ascended the brow of a hill, a young man with this idea in his heart sat down to rest himself, and when he arose he was a man devoted and set apart to the extinction of the traffic and the property of man in man. He worked all his days, and it was his sacred resolution on the brow of the hill, which, when the people helped him, won for the idea, its folios among the statutes at large. What is true of religious liberty, and the abolition of slavery, is also true of the freedom of commerce. More than ninety years ago a young professor taught in Glasgow, that wealth would be most successfully produced, were all men to produce what they could produce best, and exchange what they could exchange most advantageously. The other day this idea was partially admitted into the statute-book, but it was put there by the people. If the idea of Adam Smith has been enthroned over British commerce, and he, though dead, called to reign, the sway of his beneficent genius began in deference to the mighty voice of the people. The truth is, when traced to their source, most of the bad enactments are seen issuing from the oligarchy, and most of the good from the people. The fact is, when wisdom and beneficence have been transferred from the sparkling forges of thought into the noble forms of law and order, the people always have been the legislature. The question between oligarchy and the people, as respects legislation, is, whether the power which has done most of the good hitherto by agitations, by revolutions and convulsions, shall continue to do it in these ways, or shall begin a course of doing it directly, regularly, constantly, and peacefully. It is a question between those who have always opposed, and those who have always helped, the progress of wisdom and beneficence. When classes calling themselves educated, or superior, or learned, or noble, or reverend, presume to guage the intelligence of the people, it is a pitiful attempt of the less to comprehend the greater, and of the small to grasp the infinite. The people are the fountains of genius. Out of these fountains have issued all the

greatest talents and legislative ideas, all the men who have infused either more light, or more justice, more beauty, or more beneficence, into society. The plea for excluding all from the suffrage, on the ground of want of intelligence, is just an attempt of a selfish portion of the general intelligence to shut out the whole, of which it is but a part, from the exercise of the rights of responsibility.

The intelligence needful for making good laws is, a knowledge of what is good for all. When regular political power is withheld from them, and concentrated in other hands, genius and talent are seduced from the cause of the people to the cause of the oligarchy. This disfranchisement tends, therefore, to pervert the very sources of all progress, and turns the gifts of the children of the people against the people. Exclusion from the suffrage is exclusion from education. Unconsciously, but really, the men who desire the education of the most numerous class, and yet deny them votes, are guilty of profound hypocrisy. The moral spirit of an age is the life of its affairs. The best ideas of the time are spread in reference to its business. The best information for the people is the information necessary for their whole culture, industrial, mental, moral, social, political, and spiritual. The great educator of a people is its business. Reading, writing, arithmetic, and catechisms, schools and colleges, useful for youth and children, are nothing, in the education of a people, compared with the processes which form opinion, the discussions of the press, the senate, and the meeting. This education, instead of being merely political, cultivates all the faculties of every man, and interweaves with his sympathies and habits, according to his capacity of receiving them, the most important facts, the profoundest truths, and the noblest aspirations. The use of the instrument of responsibility-the vote-can only be acquired perfectly by habit, like the use of the hammer, the pen, the hand, the tongue. The election is a course of education, for the voter, in which the candidates and their friends are his teachers, and his affairs the subject of their prelections. The explanations of the representative, who is called to account, are discussions on the affairs of the nation and the proceedings of the senate, between the ablest of his constituents and the man who has had access to all the information of the legislature. The dismissal of the representative may call into action the indignation of the voter, and strengthen, by doing it, virtue within himself, against duplicity, tergiversation, or venality. Exclusion from the suffrage is, therefore, shown to be an attempt to exclude the man from education and training in the intelligence and virtues of the citizen.