sticks has here been most grievously verified. The old man, on his death-bed, showed his sons that they could not break a faggot, but that they could snap each individual stick as so many reeds. And kingcraft you could have snapped; priestcraft you might have broken; but kingcraft and priestcraft, bound the great faggot of aristocracy, became the dreadful abomination of desolation-the triple power of despotism; and to this hour the world lies crushed beneath it. up in But shall this endure for ever? Shall this baleful faggot never be unbound? Shall the knowledge and the power of mankind be unavailing against this antiquated contrivance of CUNNING and STRENGTH? Shall we still crouch and tremble before the goblin fables of barbarous antiquity? Shall all our knowledge of history and of our right—all the grand principles of our divine religion, whose very foundation truths are that" God has made of one blood all the nations of the earth;" and that " He is no respecter of persons "-shall not all these enable us to resist and hurl down this tyranny of caste? Shall we not, millions as we are, and men as we are, come to know our invincible might, and to rely on it as omnipotent over all the arts of Cunning and the slavery of usage, to make us free? Howitt, in his History of Priestcraft," has given to one head of the triple monster a mortal blow. It may linger, but the shaft sticks in the wound, and it will never heal. But this is but one of the heads, and not the chief one. The great head and seat of life is-ARISTOCRACY. It is this which maintains the pride of kingcraft and the subtlety of priestcraft; it is out of aristocracy that the priestly power springs: it is for its purposes that it is cherished and upheld. Aristocracy looks to royalty as one source of honour and wealth, and to priestcraft as another. The host of priests spring from the loins of aristocracy, and become a section of it, and one of its most zealous armies of defence. Cut away aristocracy, and you unbind the whole mystery of the iniquity of oppression. Kings, without an aristocracy as a body-guard, must rule with mildness, or soon cease to rule at all. Priests without an aristocracy become weak as water. They sink from the subtlest tyrants and sticklers for tyrannyinto the harmless pastors, the humble and useful parish teachers. But so long as the triple faggot is left bound, it defies the efforts of the world, and in it lurk all the demons of rapine, greed, and insolence, which plague mankind. History has shown that this great plague which still sticks to our race, and fills the modern world with everlasting bitterness and distress, foiling all the force of experience, and nullifying all the blessings of civilisation, is of eastern origin. It appeared It in those regions of ancient despotism in the earliest ages. established there, under the guidance of CUNNING and STRENGTH, the spirit of caste; the worst, the most malignant, the most disastrous spirit which ever issued from the regions of perdition. This spirit, with the aid of priestcraft, with forged revelations and supernatural terrors, divided mankind into two classes-the aristocrat and the slave. In the East, this hideous caste became, as it were, the fixed law of nature and of nations, which no man dared to question, and which yet rules there in all its force. Hindoos, Chinese, Assyrians, Egyptians, it mattered not who or what, all became the servile victims of this caste. But it did not continue only to dwell there. It marched out with the overflowing population, and inundated the whole western world. The very Greeks, the most glorious people which ever appeared in past times, could not escape its infection. Their freest forms of government betrayed traces of it. There were still seen-the aristocrat and the slave. In Europe, it developed itself in the feudal system—a system which gave to the aristocratic classes all the lands and all the honours of the countries which were invaded, and to the great mass of the people who fought out and won those realms, the labour and bondage of serfdom. words, here were again awarded—the turkey and the crow. In other In the course of this volume I shall show what has been the career of this feudalism. I shall show that in all the nations of Europe, it has run such a career of insolence and crime, of greed and despotism, that it has in turn brought every nation to the verge of destruction, has involved it in torrents of blood and ages of calamity, until it has eventually caused the people or the sovereign to crush it, or to chase it away. That it has, nevertheless, generally contrived, more or less, again to insinuate itself. That where it has come the most to prevail, there have public calamity and popular distress again appeared-where least it has been able to effect its return, there, even under despotic forms of government, the people have enjoyed_comfort and peace. What examples of this will France, England, and Germany afford us! In this place, however, it is only necessary to allude to the fact, and then to turn the eyes of the reader to the singular spectacle of the state of aristocracy in our own country, and to its most deplorable consequences. The position of England and its aristocracy at the present moment is, in fact, the most singular spectacle which the history of the world presents. It is the spectacle of the greatest of nations suffering the most suicidal wounds from its own hands. It is the spectacle of the most industrious and enterprising of people robbed of the fruits of all its labours by those who are too rich themselves to need to be robbers. It is the spectacle of a nation which, of all others, boasts of its freedom, which of all others has most nobly fought and bled for that freedom-most artfully enslaved by its aristocracy. It is that of a nation hugging itself on its finely-balanced constitution, "the envy and admiration of the world;" on its three estates, King, Lords, and Commons, while, in reality, that cunningly-devised system has been long converted into a trap for its liberties-a pitfall to swallow up its wealth—a delusion to cover it with debts and miseries. What, indeed, are these kings, lords, and commons ? Where does the power said to be invested in them really reside? Let the people of England ask themselves that great question, and they will find in its answer the one great root and source, the one great mystery of all their troubles. They will find that their boasted House of Commons is but the engine of the aristocracy to cheat them with a show of freedom, while they, through its means, rob and plunder and scourge them to their heart's content. They will find that they have not the power to move a finger of the House of Commons: that the aristocracy,-such a mighty and wealthy and luxurious aristocracy as the world never before saw-are, in truth, the possessors of all and everything in England. They possess the crown, for it is the great bauble and talisman of all their wealth and honours. They possess the House of Commons, by their sons, their purses, and their influence. They possess the church and the state, the army and the navy. They possess all offices at home and abroad. They possess the land at home, and the colonies to the end of the earth. And, what is more, they -possess the property and the profits of every man, for they have only to stretch out their great arm in a vote of the House of Commons, and they can take it as they please. If there be a man who doubts this awful state of things; who doubts whether England,-the great, indefatigable, high-hearted England,-be the patrimony and possession of the aristocracy; let him attempt to check any act of extravagance; to work any necessary reform; to extend, in the slightest degree, the liberty of the subject, through the medium of the House of Commons. For my part, it shall, in this volume, be my task to lay bare the one great and hideous evil of England: to show the one great cause of all our derangements and all our distresses,-the usurpation of the total powers of the constitution by an overgrown aristocracy, and the strange monstrosities which, in the course of this usurpation, it has perpetrated. CHAPTER II. "Howe'er that be, it seems to me True hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood." ALFRED TENNYSON. THE period from which the English aristocracy dates its origin is that of the Norman Conquest. Aristocracy, indeed, there was in the country before, but that was annihilated by the Normans; and this epoch is the vaunted birth-day of our nobility. There is nothing of which we hear so much as of the pride of a descent from these first Norman nobles; of the pure and immaculate blood derived from this long descent. To say nothing of the wretched fallacy of blood and descent,-for the most wretched and mischievous fallacy it is which ever cursed the human race,-being the pretext for every insolence, and every species of tyranny amongst men, and being besides, the most hollow bubble that ever was blown by pride, for, there is no beggar who, if he could trace his pedigree, would not find himself descended from kings, and no king who is not descended from beggars,—we will take the trouble to refer to the histories of the time, and show what these Norman conquerors really were. We shall then find that, so far from being a set of men to be proud of as ancestors, there cannot be a more scandalously disgraceful origin. They were, in fact, a swarm of the most desperate and needy adventurers; a rascal rabble of vagabond thieves and plunderers. They were not, in fact, one half of them, what they are pretended to be,-Normans; but collected by proclamation, and by lavish promises of sharing in the plunder of conquered England,-vultures from every wind of heaven rushing to the field of British carnage. We shall find that, allowing the claims of such families as now can trace a clear descent from these men-and these are very indeed-even such of them as were Normans, were but of the lower and more rapacious grade. The great vultures fleshed themselves to the throat with the first spoil, and returned home, while their places were obliged to be repeatedly supplied, through renewed proclamations, and renewed offers of the plunder of the Anglo-Saxons, from the still hungry tribes of knights who were wandering and fighting anywhere for bloody bread. few Again we shall come to the curious question, who the Normans actually were? Who actually they were who actually were Normans? And here will come another singular laying bare of the proud pretences of our proud nobles. Forsooth, they are descended from the gallant and chivalrous Normans. They will be descended from them and them alone. There is not a soul of them that will claim the honour of descent from the Danes. Oh no! The barbarous and bloody Danes, they are a scandal and an abomination! They are thieves, pirates, plunderers, and savages. Nobody is descended from them, except some plebeians in the North of England, and except that the rabble rout of the common people are contaminated with their blood. And yet, who are the Normans? Why, the Danes! Yes! the proud aristocracy of England, such of them as have any long known descent at all, are actually descended from the Danes! They are the legitimate issue of this bloody and barbarous people that nobody wishes to acknowledge as ancestors. The Danes, driven from England, fell on the shores of France, and amid the distractions of that kingdom, laid Paris in ashes, and seized on that district which thence received from these Northmenner or Normans, its name of Normandy. Here, though settled too comfortably for their deserts, they never ceased to keep an eye on the far richer prize of England, from which, for their cruelties and fiery devastations, they had been chased away. In the time of the Conqueror, they had been settled about two centuries in France; and though they had acquired a considerable degree of external civilisation, and much martial discipline, yet, if we are to judge by their proceedings on the acquisition of England, they had lost none of their greedy hunger of spoil, nor of their reckless and ruthless disposition to shed blood. Edward the Confessor was the son of Emma of Normandy, a notorious woman. He had been chiefly brought up at the Norman court, and, during his reign, the Norman nobles flocked over in crowds to England, and showed themselves as greedy and rapacious as any of their ancestors, the Danes, had been. They engrossed every great office on which they could lay their hands, especially in the church; and through their rapacity and insolence, became detested by the people. The conduct of a party of them under the Count of Boulogne, in 1051, occasioned an outbreak of popular wrath in Dover, which brought the kingdom to the very point of a civil war, and only ended by filling the army as full of these harpies as the church had been before. The effeminate and misled king became surrounded by countless shoals of them, crowding to enrich themselves. Amongst these, he invited one, William of Normandy, who made good use of the visit, looking round on the beautiful and wealthy island, as a most |