THE

ARISTOCRACY OF ENGLAND.

CHAPTER L

"God has made of one blood all the nations of the earth."

AN Indian and a Kentuckian once made an agreement to hunt in company, and divide equally the game which they might chance to kill. Unfortunately, a crow and a wild turkey were all they shot. "Well," said the Kentuckian, at the end of the day, "as we are to divide equally, you take the crow, and I'll take the turkey; or I'll take the turkey, and you take the crow."-"How's that?" inquired the Indian. The Kentuckian in rapid accents repeated his proposal, to which the Indian, after a blank and puzzled look, consented, but with the remark:-" It sounds all very fair; but, somehow or other, you always get the turkey, and I always get the crow."

This is an admirable illustration of the mode, not only in which the Americans have dealt with the Indians, but in which the aristocracy in all countries and ages have dealt with the people. Everywhere the cunning and the strong have leagued with the mass, under pretence of achieving the common good, but with the secret object of securing merely their own. They have put themselves at the head of nations, with the proposal to divide equally the benefits accruing from this partnership, but they have invariably contrived to keep the turkey, and put off the poor bamboozled people with the crow.

It is the curse of humanity that marriages and modes of government must be entered into at the very period which is the least adapted to secure a rational bargain. Both individuals and nations are compelled by the very nature of things to negotiate

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the most momentous contract of their lives at the age when they have the least experience. Hence the vast and dismal wreck of both domestic and national happiness. Ignorance and passion are the guides; deception, and often irretrievable misery, are the legitimate consequences. The parties have neither had time to discover the realities of life, nor the true character of those with whom they enter into the most awful and indissoluble unions. They learn these only when it is too late.

If we look round us, either at home or abroad, we shall see that the galling grievances of nations are all derived from this source. Their ancestors, in the days of barbarism, darkness, and violence, have entered into this absurd alliance with Cunning and Strength. They have hunted with them, and come off with the crow. They have surrendered the fearful machine of government into base hands, and by that very machine they are now crushed and ground. They have begun exactly at the wrong end of things, allowing Cunning and Strength to usurp what should only be committed, with the subtlest caution and under the most stringent restrictions, to the temporary keeping of Wisdom and Goodness; and the whole business of politics is, and has been throughout all generations, and in all countries, to remedy the consequences of this fatal concession; to wrest this mighty trust of the governing power out of unworthy hands. This has been the anxious toil of ages; this is the whole, the agonised, the incessant strife of the daily life of millions, and hitherto in vain. And why? Because the delegated power of government is the most awful trust in the world. It is so pregnant with the most immeasurable consequences; it involves so deeply the happiness of whole ages, and of every individual, that even in the best, the bravest, and the wisest times, it cannot be put into any hands but with the profoundest fears, and seldom without the most mortifying consequences.

There is a good old anecdote of a gentleman who, during his lifetime, had surrendered his real estate to his children, and had thenceforward been treated with the same ingratitude which befel King Lear, till he caused a great iron chest, which he had carefully stowed away under his bed, to be shown to his sons, and said, "There lies, after all, the most invaluable of my treasures, far exceeding in worth all my lands." This brought back to him reverence and obedience. On his death, eager was the rush of the sons to the opening of the chest, in which, however, was found only a great mallet, on which was written this rude rhyme :

"He who parts with his power before he is dead,

Take ye this mallet and knock him o' th' head."

The moral of this distich is not the less applicable to nations than to individuals. The whole mass of history is but its melancholy inculcation. There is not a nation on the face of the earth where we do not see the fatal effects of this weak surrender; which has not been cruelly knocked on the head for it.. Governments treat the people, not as their masters, but as their slaves: not as the power from which their commission and authority are derived, but as creatures subject by God and nature to their domination, for that domination's sake: not as the great family of rational and immortal beings, by whom they are appointed to the management of their necessary affairs, but as a "rascal rabble " over whom they are, of their own inherent right, set to pinch and peel, to riot and to revel. They regard themselves not as the elected servants of the community, to whom they should, therefore, render all respect, and towards whom they should cherish love and gratitude, for whom they should labour to procure nothing but happiness, and to whom they should be thankful for their pay; but as slave-drivers, whose great merit consists in outraging every feeling of independence in the self-subjected multitude, and in enriching themselves at their expense.

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The business of nations is like the business of individuals it requires the employment of stipendiaries to carry it on for the good of the master and his family. THAT IS THE ONLY OBJECT AND END OF MANAGEMENT, WHETHER OF A FAMILY OR OF A NATION.

Whence come, then, the absurdity and the misery, that while the servants of a family, or the stewards of individuals, know themselves and their office, and labour in all due subordination for the good of their employers, the servants and the stewards of nations no sooner are entrusted with their commissions, than they undergo the most villanous metamorphosis; reverse the very order of nature; turn the means into the end, the masters into the servants, and ride on the necks of their creators, laughing at their credulity, and armed with whips and spurs, which dig into their very vitals, and drain their very life's-blood?

It is because the world has not yet, with all its wit and wisdom, outlived the vile witchcraft of its barbarism. It is because it has not yet, with all its boasted strength of knowledge, been able to burst the chains, which, in the darkness of its early ages, were wrapped round its soul. There still lie the poison of early prejudice, and the subtle might of habit. There still lurks, in the dungeons of its unenlightened depths, the brutal Giant Despair, who drags down its knights of enterprise, and "grinds their bones to make him bread." Free do we call ourselves, while we stand

in the eye of heaven shaking our chains, and the very angels blush at the ignominious spectacle!

In the first ages our fathers, a rude and uninstructed multitude, seeking their daily bread in the sweat of their brow, needed leaders against their foes, who sought to snatch their hard-earned morsel from them, and magistrates to settle their differences regarding it, amongst themselves. Then came CUNNING and STRENGTH, and put themselves at their head. They indeed rendered them great services, and they might have rendered them more. They delivered them from their external foes, but the mischief of it was that they became, as they intended, their tyrants. As the horse in the fable requested the man to mount his back and avenge him of his enemies, so Cunning and Strength, once mounted on the back of mankind, could never again be unseated. The iron bit was in the mouth, the rowels were in the side, the wire-lash was on the shoulders, and the man-multitude became a slave. It had no time to look even into its grievances. To dig, to hunt, to swelter in hewing, and in groaning under burdens for the sustaining morsel, was the bitter lot of all rude people; and when they ceased to be rude, they found themselves the hereditary slaves of Cunning and Strength.

The worst evil was not the mere subjection-it was that by which subjection was perpetuated. Cunning and Strength had called in to their aid Superstition, in all its forms and terrors. They had abused the weak mind of the unlettered multitude with the notions of DIVINE RIGHT; they had arrayed themselves in the triple panoply of kingcraft, priestcraft, and aristocraft. Heaven, and Earth, and Hell were peopled by them with powers of splendour and punishment, which proclaimed their own everlasting lordship, and frightened the multitude into everlasting submission. Kings and lords, priests and warriors, swarmed on the earth, and lorded it with lash and sword, with anathemas and manacles, over the affrighted millions. War, which commenced as a necessary evil, became arrayed in artificial glories, which made it at once eternal, and the annihilation of all liberty. The objects and ends of civil government were forgotten or carefully concealed; and to this hour, spite of all our advance in science and philosophy, the science and the philosophy of government remain practically unasserted. We cringe still be neath the spectres of the past. "The child is still father of the man. The world in its youth was terrified with the nursery monsters of goblins and fiends; and now, in its manhood, it still trembles in the dark,

But the most fatal error in this career was that of suffering the growth of an ARISTOCRACY. The fable of the bundle of