little settled notion of State policy there is in any of them. Let him see, too, how each opinion flickers and changes with the patent facts of the day, and with what the last newspaper said; and note how various the opinions are. Perhaps no two heads will have any notion quite the same—some extrinsic notion—some cuckoo’s egg, perchance, of stolid prejudice. Neither man nor nation can be vigorous except upon a defined and settled creed.

The advocates of the artizan’s claims ought to take warning by France. The visible experiment there conclusively proves that universal suffrage will not necessarily help ouvriers. The intelligent workmen of Paris and Lyons, and elsewhere, are the most eager opponents of the Imperial Government. Their imagined socialism was the object—if not the real object, at least the alleged and believed object—struck at by the coup d’état; there is never an election of deputies at which they do not return as many opponents of the Emperor as they can. Yet the Emperor boasts, and truly boasts, that he rules by universal suffrage; firmly based on the fear and ignorance of innumerable rural proprietors, he despises the intelligent working men, as well as the literary classes of the great towns; he knows both hate him, and he lets both hate him. Because France, in comparison with England, is a homogeneous country, and because its rural population greatly outnumbers its town population, and because the nature of an elected empire abolishes the influence of minorities, the result of universal suffrage has no doubt there been the establishment of a strong government. But that government is established by the enslavement of the particular intelligent class whom here we wish to enfranchise; and as we are not a homogeneous country, and as we have a Parliamentary Government which preserves some influence for minorities, we should not get the good from universal suffrage that the French have, although we should get the evil, for the thinking artizan would be outnumbered here as much as there.

The very nature of our social system, therefore, forbids those rough and rude changes which the boldest political physicians prescribe. Those changes would not, indeed, as unthinking people fancy, cause massacre and confiscation. In spite of De Tocqueville, in spite of a hundred similar teachers, the instantia terrifica of the original French Revolution still rules men’s fancies. They think that democracy means the guillotine; that as Sydney Smith said, ‘it abolishes human life and human rents.’ But here democracy would mean the rule of money, and mainly and increasingly of new money working upon ignorance for its own ends. It would not destroy our constitution by sudden revolution, but it would vitally impair it by spoiling our Parliament. What then must be done? Is our electoral system so refined, so delicate, that we cannot venture to touch it? Can we not meet the wants of this age as our fathers did that of other ages?

Something will have to be done. The numerous, the organised, the intellectual class of artizans who live close to our greatest wealth, and in the very foci of our most delicate credit, must not be teased with the continual proffer of the suffrage and the continued denial of it. Their physical strength we might indeed well cope with, if we had the rest of the nation to back us. They are a great and formidable number, but they could be coerced at once if they were the assailants of property or the enemies of order. If their cause was unjust, we could resist them; but we have neither physical nor moral force to use when their demand is judicious. They are a class fit to be entrusted with the franchise, and whom it is desirable to entrust with it.

The simplest expedient which has as yet been proposed for that purpose is to recur to the old English system of different suffrages in different boroughs, which existed down to the Act of 1832. Whether that system can or cannot be revived, I think there can be little doubt that its abolition was an error. It gave an element of variety to our constitution, exactly where it was wanted. Sir James Mackintosh and Lord Russell, and other Whig authorities, had written panegyrics on it. In the hurry of a half revolution, and from the need of a simple bill, this valuable legacy of old times was unhappily discarded. But if it can be revived now, it affords the readiest and easiest help out of our palpable difficulty.

But I have not to deal now with this or that plan for representing artizans; I have to do here with the Reform question not as respects its solution, but as respects its difficulty. It affords the best illustration of the nature of our constitution, such as history and the nature of the people have made it. It shows the difficulty