suggest, a superlative. It is clear that the proposed extension was offered as, and to be taken as, part of an unfinished system; and since, by this one step, the property qualification was to be diminished one-halffrom a ten pound to a five pound rent for cities and boroughs, and from a fifty to a twenty pound rent for the counties-it would seem that it would want but one more step in the same direction, on the same ratio of progression, to bring us to universal suffrage.-Page 237, Political Elements, by J. Moseley, Esq., B.C.L.

Should this Bill be again offered and pass into law, before the next step, universal suffrage, care must be taken to have made the lower classes able to obtain titles in land. Free trade in land has made the peasants in other countries conservative. They must have obtained also enlightenment in which, at present, the lower classes in England are much wanting.

In the present state of land tenure and enlightenment of the popular mind, it is much to be feared universal suffrage would only prove the harbinger to revolution.

"What, I would ask, has induced the Governments of Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, and indeed of all the German countries, as well as those of Switzerland and Sardinia, to grant universal suffrage so willingly to their people? Simply this: that these Governments knew that the whole of the peasants were strongly conservative by interest and disposition; that they were the steadiest of all the supporters of public order and of a firm Government; that the people of the towns were the most democratic; and that to grant the suffrage to

them, and not to the peasants, would be to put themselves in the hands of the anarchists, and to deprive themselves of the powerful and certain support of the body of the peasant proprietors.

Urged by these views, these Governments have not attempted to limit the number of the electors by adopting a property qualification, but have admitted the whole people to the electoral privileges. They could not have adopted a more conservative policy; for they have, by this means, enabled the peasants to swell the members of the Conservative party in the Chambers, by sending thither representatives of their own feelings and principles.

All the substratum of society, in most of the rural districts of these countries, is conservative. It is the minority only who are interested in political change. The English order of things is inverted. In England it is the peasants and operatives who fancy they have nothing to lose and much to gain by a revolution of society. It is the majority with us who think they are deeply interested in an upturning of society. It is the majority who hope to gain some share of the vast territorial domains of the nobles, or at least to get some part of those great tracts of waste land which they observe lying uncultivated by any one, or who, without having any specific views whatever, say, We cannot lose, for we have nothing to lose; we cannot be poorer than we are, or more wretched than we are; we may possibly gain by the change, but, if not, it is clear we cannot lose.

There are vast masses, not only of our town operatives,

but also of our country peasants, who, in times of commotion, reason in this manner, and are at the back of the first demagogue who arouses their slumberiug feelings.

Symptoms of this under-current of passion are now and then vouchsafed us, like the warnings of a volcano. Sometimes we have Rebecca riots, sometimes Chartist risings, sometimes actual insurrections, sometimes widespread incendiary fires; and in Ireland constant rebellion. The more intelligence spreads among the poor of our country, the more will all this increase, unless we alter the laws which tend to prevent the peasants acquiring property. The classes who are deprived of the natural means of improving their social condition will rise more and more fiercely against the obstacles which beset them, the more clearly they perceive those obstacles. If it be necessary or expedient that the present landed system should be continued, it would be wisest to get rid of every school in the country.— Kay, Vol. I., p. 217.

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CHAPTER XV.

ON THE IDEAL OF THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION.

OUR Parliament should try to realise the ideal of the British Constitution, and for the following reasons:— Nations are improved in proportion as they are under improved institutions. The British is the best form of government, and therefore worthy to be improved to the utmost. The nations of the Continent now groaning under military despotism, and tired of Republican institutions, will be looking to Great Britain for a model form of Government. How important they should see our institutions exhibited in their best form.

Nations become improved and happy in proportion as they have been favoured with improved institutions.

"The examination of foreign countries and of history clearly shows that the moral, intellectual, and physical condition of any people, no matter what their race, is almost entirely the result of the laws and institutions under which they live, and that this condition is capable of indefinite improvement by an improvement of their laws and institutions.

There is no better or more remarkable illustration of this remark, nor any which is more frequently quoted in foreign countries, than the difference between the

character and habits of Irishmen in their own land and their character and habits in the United States, in the British colonies, and in the British army. In his own country, exposed to the wretched under-lessee system and under-agent system of Ireland; to the discontented spirit of a priesthood, which we have treated as if we desired to render it inimical to our Government; to the galling sense of foreign rule suggested by the presence of English soldiers; and to the irritating thought that his rent goes to aggrandise the splendour of a distant capital, and that the hall of the landlord is deserted; the Irishman becomes discontented, idle, and criminal. Send him to Australia, to the States, or to any English colony where he can make himself by his industry a proprietor of land, and where he is not shackled by middle-age legislation, and he becomes immediately the most energetic and conservative of colonists. He there acquires faster than any one else; he effects more in a day than any one else; and he forces his rulers to write home to England, as the Governor of South Australia did a few years ago, that the Irish are the most enterprising, successful, and orderly of all the colonists of these distant lands. Put the Irishman in the English army, or in the manufacturing districts of England, and similar results invariably follow. In the army he makes a first-rate soldier, while in Lancashire, where he is sure to earn as much as his day's labour is worth, where the galling misgovernment of his own country does not affect him, and where he is put on a level with the English labourer, he at once becomes a formidable rival of the Englishman under every respect, and one