fruitfulness, and the oaks of genius dart their roots into the flintiest rocks of poverty, and lift their branches high above the crowd.

Never let the glorious truth be forgotten, that the good and the salvation of the world always come, and always have come, from the HUT. Christ came thence; the patriarchs, the prophets, and apostles came thence; the greatest sages and philosophers, the true founders and builders of national wealth and glory—of the power and the happiness of man, have come thence in all ages.

CHAPTER XXVII.

FINAL APPEAL.

"Arise! awake! or be for ever fallen!"-MILTON.

FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN—

What Dr. Franklin, in his "Poor Richard's Almanack," said to

his countrymen, I say now to you :

"I send you here a little book

For you to look upon,

That you may see your father's face

Now he is dead and gone."

YOUR father's face is the face of the people of England in all past ages of their country's history, from the first day that they began to strive for national liberty, till they drove out bad kings and nobles, and established the constitution of 1688. They established it, but you have lost it. How you lost it this history tells. It is a grave fault to have betrayed that glorious trust reposed in you-the guardianship of the liberties, and with it the advance and the happiness of posterity. By this betrayal you have already inflicted on yourselves, on millions of the poorer portion of yourselves, unutterable wants, wrongs, and miseries; and these wants, wrongs, and miseries must continue, and will multiply themselves grievously, till you have resumed this sacred trust, by restoring the popular portion of the constitution.

Look back, then, fellow-countrymen, and reflect well and solemnly, by what means it is that you have lost your birthright, "the noblest inheritance of mankind," which, in the words of

Blackstone, "posterity will demand at your hands." Is it by some national defect of character that you have lost it? Or is it by a generous, too trusting disposition, in itself a failing, though a noble one? Or is it not, in combination with this, owing to the circumstance, that while you have been eagerly occupied in your trade, your foreign commerce, your founding and establishing of colonies, your manufactures, your ships, your steamers and railroads, and in all the arts and inventions that are required to raise and conduct such great and multifarious concerns to success, your cunning adversaries, in the guise of your friends and legislators, have had nothing to do but to fix their undivided attention on one object-the undermining of your constitution, and the expulsion of yourselves from it. You were told, and you believed it, and it was indeed the fact, that by your execution of Charles I. as a traitor to the constitution, and your expulsion of the infatuated despot, James II., by the free choice of a new king, and the passing of the Bill of Rights, you had fixed the constitution on the fair basis of popular power, and of a full, free, and uninfluenced representation. In the generous confidence inspired by the greatness of your deed, and the dread nature of the examples you had made of tyrants, you gave, however, occasion to the vigilant enemy to deceive you; and how they have deceived you by flatteries, while they stole the jewel of "your full, free, and uninfluenced representation," this history too well shows.

This is nothing new in the histories of nations. Aristocracies have brought every civilised country, by turns, to ruin, through their selfish intrigues and ambition. It was my intention to have gone fully and historically into this subject, but the abundance of domestic matter has denied me the necessary space. Turn your eyes, however, in what direction you please, and there lie the examples of aristocratic desolation. Who ruined the intellectual states of Greece? The aristocracy which assumed their management. Who betrayed the Roman republic, and converted it into a despotism, from which hour the national decline commenced? The aristocracy, with the Cæsars at their head. In vain the first successful traitor fell by the hand of the indignant Brutus: there were plenty of his fellows to succeed him. Rome became imperial, and perished. Turn your eyes, however, nearer to your own times, to Spain. What has reduced that country to the anarchy and misery of the present time? The pride, the luxury, the ambition, and effeminate sloth of the aristocracy. From the hour that South American gold poured into Spain, the Hidalgoes grew into a condition of haughty voluptuousness, that sapped the productive power of the country,

and hastened on a rapid declension of national wisdom, simplicity, and industry, from that time to the present. In this corrupt sloth, knowledge was neglected. Lord Byron, when there, found the lady and the lady's-maid equally ignorant. The people of Spain are universally described as a fine people. They have shown that they possess the elements of freedom and vigour in no ordinary degree, by the bloody resistance they have made to repeated tyrants, and the decision with which they at once pulled to the ground, in that so-called superstitious country, the great, corrupt system of monkery. But the nobles ?-When Lord Wellington entered that country as a saviour, there could scarcely be found a man of that class who understood the duties of a good general; and as an order they were feeble, disunited, and far more greedy of English gold than desirous of the aid of English arms. They were at the same time too stupidly proud to act under the direction of our more experienced commanders. Their armies were scattered before the French like autumnal leaves, and their country might have lain under the feet of the foe for ages, had not other nations fought the battle for them. The whole class was torn to pieces with cabals and factions. They were at once ignorant, extravagant, and covered with debt; and were for ever craving after our gold, though they hated our heretical persons. From that hour it has continued the same. The Spanish people, brave and independent, find no able leaders in this corrupted class, and they have not yet advanced far enough to free themselves from them; and anarchy and continual revolutions and counter-revolutions go on. In the meantime they fight against any immediate oppressor, and when the enemy disappears, return cheerfully to the cultivation of their soil. No people live so lightly as they. They possess the soil, and are therefore always ready to rise from their temporary troubles under their fine climate. It is the government that is ruined, not the people.

Turn to Germany. There the nobles had long undermined the ancient freedom of the empire. Every petty count aspired to be a prince. He severed his little territory from the government of the whole; set up a separate independence—the right of the axe and the gallows-till the country, dissected into two thousand little states, fell a ready prey to Napoleon. He swept away a host of tyrant nobles, and the country is all the better for it.

Look again at Sweden. That country was, and is, in the hands of a swarming nobility. This nobility, at the approach of the Russians, sold the fortresses and strong positions in Finland and Pomerania for money; which thus became lost to the country

for ever, and which loss they had then the meanness to make one of the charges against their king, Gustavus IV., for which they deposed him, and adopted Bernadotte. The country is still oppressed by the incubus of this nobility, which usurps all honours, offices, and emoluments; and the nation groans and declines under them. On the contrary, Norway, though subjected to Sweden, by the arrangements of the great European powers, has with a brave spirit resisted all Swedish attempts to bring it into the same aristocratic subjection. It arose in arms, compelled a free representative government, and abolished aristocracy. The land and government are in the hands of the people; and what are the consequences? Agriculture and trade flourish, and the nation, according to Mr. Laing, presents the most singular contrast to Sweden. In the one country there is an air of neglect and decay; in the other, of comfort and prosperity. In the one, of crime and misery; in the other, of virtue and enjoyment. Mr. Laing pronounces the Norwegians to be, through this their wise and stout decision to govern themselves as they act for themselves in private life, the most happy and flourishing of European nations.

Look finally at France. Every one is familiar with the dreadful condition to which its proud and imbecile aristocracy reduced it. Every one knows in what a storm of blood and terror the oppressed people rose and took an eternal vengeance on their oppressors. If we read the accounts of France, just previous to the Revolution, we cannot avoid being struck with a terrible similarity of circumstances and features with those of our own country now. Nay, the following description by their own historian, Thiers, seems to be that of England at present.

"The condition of the country, both political and economical, was intolerable. There was nothing but privilege-privilege vested in individuals, in classes, in towns, in provinces, and even in trades and professions. Everything contributed to check industry and the natural genius of man. All the dignities of the state, civil, ecclesiastical, and military, were exclusively reserved to certain individuals. No man could take up a profession without certain titles, and the compliance with certain pecuniary conditions. Even the favours of the crown were converted into family property, so that the king could scarcely exercise his own judgment, or give any preference. Almost the only liberty left to the sovereign was that of making pecuniary gifts, and he had been reduced to the necessity of disputing with the duke of Coigny for the abolition of a useless place. Everything, then, was made immoveable property in the hands of a few, and everywhere these few resisted the many who had been despoiled.

The burdens of the state weighed on one class only. The noblesse and the clergy possessed about two-thirds of the landed property; the other third, possessed by the people, paid taxes to the king, a long list of feudal droits to the noblesse, tithes to the clergy, and had, moreover, to support the devastations committed by noble sportsmen and their game. The taxes upon consumption pressed upon the great multitude, and consequently on the people. The collection of these imposts was managed in an unfair and irritating manner; the lords of the soil left long arrears with impunity, but the people, upon any delay in payment, were harshly treated, arrested, and condemned to pay in their persons, in default of money to produce. The people, therefore, nourished with their labour, and defended with their blood, the higher classes of society, without being able to procure a comfortable subsistence for themselves. The townspeople, a body of citizens, industrious, educated, less miserable than the people, could nevertheless obtain none of the advantages to which they had a right to aspire, seeing that it was their industry that nourished and their talents that adorned the kingdom."

Is not that a wonderful fac-simile of our own present condition? But these circumstances produced revolution in France; what will they produce here? If they are allowed to continue, they will produce the very same thing. The French historians assert, that had the cries of the people been listened to before they grew maddened with their miseries, there would have been reform instead of revolution, and the nation would have been spared the years of unexampled horror and self-laceration through which it had to wade. Now is the same saving crisis with us! The people, the most industrious of them in town and country, starve by tens of thousands, or lead a sort of half life in incessant labour, rags, and hunger. All parts of our social system call out for relief. The manufacturer, the farmer, equally complain; the agricultural labourers are reduced to a condition worse than serfdom-to a condition of unparalleled destitution; and in some districts gangs of them are driven to the field, as we learn from parliamentary reports, under gang-masters, and are lodged promiscuously like cattle-men, women, and children, in temporary booths, fitter for beasts than human beings.

In many parts of this once happy country the agricultural labourers are getting but five and six shillings per week; while they are asked 87. an acre for bits of land to set a few potatoes on. The labourers of Wiltshire have lately met by moonlight and made known that their miseries were equal to those of the labourers of Dorsetshire. What a ghastly meeting was that at