we say that it is an economical, industrious, and pacific age, or one of restlessness, danger, alarm and war? On the other hand, if there is nothing in surrounding Europe to justify the armaments of France, what must we think of the deliberate schemes of the French Government and the probabilities of peace ? There is, too, another consideration-namely that, whatever be the reason and meaning of these facts, they are facts which must be accepted with their natural consequences. You cannot pile barrels of gunpowder round your neighbour's house without danger of a spark falling from your own chimney or his, or from the torch of some fool or incendiary. In the presence then of these phenomena, indicating what they do of the reciprocal relations and attitude of the most civilized states, can we say that the political aspect of the world and the condition of international morality would be unaptly described in the language applied to them two hundred years ago by Hobbes: "Every nation "has a right to do what it pleases to "other commonwealths. And withal "they live in the condition of perpetual 66 war, with their frontiers armed and "cannons planted against their neigh"bours round about."?

There are, notwithstanding, sanguine politicians, who look upon these things as transitional and well-nigh past, who view the darkest prospects of the hour as the passing clouds of the morn

ing of peace, and the immediate heralds of that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. Of the advent of that period not one doubt is meant to be suggested here. But the measures of time which history and philosophy put into our hands are different from those which the statesman must employ. An age is but as a day to the eye to which the condition of the globe when it was first trodden by savage men is present. But those whose vision is confined to the fleeting moments so important to themselves, which cover their own lifetime and that of their children, will deem the reign of peace far distant if removed to a third generation.

What, then, is the interpretation of the signs of the times on which a practical people should fix its scrutiny? To this question, the question of the age -whether it means peace or war—it is believed that the preceding pages supply a partial answer, which we have not here room to make more full and definite; or it could be shown that the form and spirit of the age, the imperfection of the mechanism for the adjustment of international rights, the malorganization of continental polities, the impending repartition of Europe, and the aspect of remoter portions of the globe compose a political horizon charged with the elements of war.

WHY were the people of England so earnest on behalf of the Reform Bill of 1831 Why are the people of England so indifferent about the Reform Bill of 1860? We have all asked ourselves these questions. I doubt whether party politicians will ever find the answers to them. I am sure that those who are not party politicians are quite as much interested in the answers to them as they can be.

So far as those whom we commonly describe as the Working Classes are concerned, an à priori speculator might have looked for exactly the opposite result to that which he witnesses. Those classes were not specially considered in Lord Grey's Bill; the classes with which they had least sympathy, the great producers and the shop keepers, were specially considered in it. They had been taught, by most of the speakers and writers who had influence over them, to suspect the Whigs; the Whigs were the authors of the measure. Nevertheless, the cry for the bill, and the whole bill, went through the length and breadth of the land. It arose from the lowest courts and alleys; the wisest confessed it to be indeed a national cry; the bravest, with the Duke of Wellington at their head, bowed before it.

The Bill of 1860 does contemplate these working classes; appears designed especially for them. The popular agiNo. 8.-VOL. II.

tator tells them that, if they gain so much, all else they want will follow. He speaks with an ability and an eloquence which few of his predecessors in the same line possessed. He addresses himself directly to the material interests of these classes. The aristocrats, he says, are taxing them cruelly; if they can procure a great numerical addition to the constituencies, much of the taxation will be unnecessary, much will be turned in another direction. What can move them if these arguments do not?

The facts say, There must be some arguments which move the hearts of men more than these. And à priori reasoning must bow to facts in a practical country like England.

It may

sound very absurd, to say that calculations of profit and loss do not affect people who are poor, and may starve, as much as appeals to their conscience and their sympathy. Young gentlemen who know the world are struck at once with the folly of such an assertion. But I suspect that these young gentlemen fall into the fallacy of confounding the stomach with reasonings about the stomach, which address themselves not to it, but to the brain. The bakers' shops had a voice for the hungry crowds who poured out of St. Antoine, which might drown discourses about liberty and the rights of man. But discourses about liberty and the

H

rights of man were more effective upon those crowds, than arguments respecting the price of the luxuries or even the necessaries of life. In times of revolution, as well as in times of quiet, the same lesson is forced upon us. Working men-yes, even if they are also suffering men-demand that you should do homage to something in them which is not material, which is not selfish. When they claim to be adopted as part of the nation, not to be regarded as standing outside of it, phantoms of pecuniary advantage or pecuniary exemption may float before their eyes. You may possibly be able to persuade them that those phantoms are all that they are pursuing, can pursue, ought to pursue. But before you bring them to that conviction, you will have quite established another in their minds. You will have left them in no doubt that those are the objects you are following after; that you identify the privilege of belonging to a nation-of being a living and governing part of it-with the outward good things which it procures for you. And they will despise and hate you for that baseness; will despise and hate you the more because you give them credit for sharing in it.

Any one who recollects the kind of feeling which was at work in 1831 and 1832 will quickly apply this remark to that time. The indignation in the people, whether justified or not, was a moral indignation. It was an indignation against the upper classes as caring for their material interests more than for the well-being of the nation. The cry was, "The purse is supreme. "bought and sold. These peers who "call themselves noble, and talk about a glorious ancestry, care only for their acres. These clergy who tell us about

We are

a Kingdom of Heaven, care only for "their livings on earth. We must have "all that set right. Three cheers for the "bill." I am not saying that there was not great unfairness in these cries. I am saying only that they had more weight with the body of the people, more influence in securing their votes for the proposed reform, than any

reasonings about the effect of admitting by a 50%. franchise in the counties or a 107. franchise in the towns. The scandal and the shame of confounding high, national, divine interests, with low, class, material interests, struck the conscience of men who could not understand nice questions about representation. And that conscience, far more than all the skill of those who framed the bill, or the ingenuity of those who defended it, or the eagerness of those who profited by it, overcame an opposition that was formidable not for the wealth and traditional influence only, but for the character, the wisdom, and the earnestness of those who took part in it.

I do not allude to the formal opposition in either House. I allude to those who were certain never to be members of Parliaments to some of the most mature thinkers of that day. A few of my readers will have heard themselves, all of us know by report, the eloquent discourses which Mr. Wordsworth was wont to pour forth against the Bill. Yet he was not ashamed of his early revolutionary fervour; his later Toryism was associated with profound reverence for the lower classes, with independence of aristocratical patronage. Mr. Hallam, born and bred amongst Whigs -living amongst them-expressed, at a time when the weight of his testimony as a constitutional historian would have been most valuable to his friends, what must have been a most serious, because a most reluctant, disapprobation of their measure. Can it be doubted that both these illustrious men, starting from such opposite points, with characters and education so dissimilar, agreed in their conclusion, because both equally dreaded a sacrifice of moral and intellectual to material interests, from the predominance of the class which the bill proposed to enfranchise? On the other hand, what endeared it to the younger men of the literary and professional class who reverenced the authority of these guides, and yet could not stoop to it, but the experience which they had, or thought they had, of

the terrible weight of those same material interests in the system which the bill disturbed? In many a house, where a grave and righteous father, or uncle, somewhere on the wrong side of sixty, met a son or nephew just fresh from college, with a mind which he had helped to form, and which reflected his own, did a dialogue take place, not much varying in substance from this :—

Senex. I wish you could tell me why you have fallen in love with this new constitution which Lord Grey is so good as to devise for us.

Juvenis. You remember Johnson, sir; he passed part of one long vacation with me at your house.

Senex. Of course, I remember him; a very clever, sparkling fellow. Absurdly liberal; but with no harm in him. I shall be glad to see him again. What has that to do with my question?

Juvenis. He comes in for the borough of Y on Lord P's interest.

Senex. On Lord P's interest! one of the most conspicuous names in Schedule A. Dead against the bill!

Juvenis. Just so. Johnson, knowing all the arguments for it, and heartily sympathising in them, can, of course, oppose it much more effectually than those who have only learnt by heart the common-places on the other side.

Senex. Humph! Some who think as I do might utter words of triumph about the easy virtue of Radicals. I do not. I am as sorry for your friend as you can be.

Juvenis. Well, sir! And must I not hate a system with perfect hatred which reduces a man-one with whom I have exchanged thoughts and hopes, one whom I care for, in all respects a better as well as a wiser man than I am-into a creature whom I am obliged to despise?

Senex. Be true to thyself, my boy, and then thou wilt not be false to any man, or to thy country, though thou mayst make thousands of mistakes.

Juvenis. You have taught me not to lie, sir; I owe therefore to you my hatred of this serpent which is tempting us all to lie. I do not understand, let me say it with all deference, your tolerance of

feudalism. Of all persons I have ever known, you abhor money-worship most, and have kept your soul freest from it. How can you endure that which persuades the wise and the unwise that their tongues, their hearts, their manhood, are all articles for sale?

Senex. My respect for aristocracy is increased, not diminished, by the horror I have of these proceedings; by my certainty that they will bring a curse upon those who commit them, and upon the land. If an aristocracy forgets that it is a witness for intellect and manhood, and against the power of the purse, I am not to forget it. I am not to endue with power those who believe only in the purse, I who think that all institutions which connect us with the past, which tell us that we are a nation of men, are hindrances to its triumphs, and therefore should be swept away. The new Reform Bill means that for me; therefore, I protest against it.

Juvenis. It seems to me, sir, that the incubus which is pressing upon us must be got rid of somehow, and that we must not shrink from any efforts, shun any allies, fear to face any consequences, if we can but throw it off.

I wish to illustrate by this dialogue the common feeling which was at work in the most earnest men who took opposite sides in this great controversy. I wish to show that that common feeling was a dread lest the nation should perish through the idolatry of material interests by one or other of its classes.

This

feeling was stronger than all questions of detail; strong enough to make those who accepted the bill endure many details in it which they disliked-those who rejected it fear many of its gifts which they might have been glad to receive. And this feeling, it seems to me, won the triumph. The aristocracy had committed the sin with which they were charged. The judgment for it could not be delayed. It came in a form which averted the doom of which many supposed it was the trumpet.

The wisdom of the aged could not prevail against the righteous decrees of

Heaven. It did make itself good against many of the dreams and hopes of the young men, in which heavenly and earthly elements were mixed. Their turn for murmuring against the ten-pound householders of the town was to come. The complaints were repeatedloudly repeated-by the working men, who had joined to procure for the middle class its new position. In the case, however, of the professional class, they produced what was called a "Conservative reaction;" in the other case they issued in a fiercer radicalism. The one talked of the old constitution, dreamt of times when men cared less for money than they do now, detected some truth in what they had been used to describe as platitudes respecting the wisdom of our ancestors; the other cried for manhood-suffrage and the points of the charter. They were apparently, therefore, moving farther and farther from each other; the first regretting that the aristocracy had conceded so much, the other saying that to them they had conceded nothing. Meantime a victory was won by that class of which both were jealous; a victory which curiously illustrates the subject I am considering. The Conservative party rose to power supported by the cry that the new class to which the Reform Bill had given so much influence would sacrifice all old institutions to mere immediate material interests if they were not withstood. The Conservative party bound itself to the preservation of an immediate material interest. No doubt many of its members looked upon the Corn Laws in a higher light than this; no doubt they regarded them as sacred ancient institutions. But the conscience of the country could not recognise them under this name. It pronounced them a selfish monopoly contrived for the good of a class; it passed sentence upon them. Sir Robert Peel, not in the character of a representative of middle-class feelings -however he may deserve on some grounds to be so described-but as a practical statesman, confessed a power which was too strong for him, and sacrificed to it his party and his reputation.

Let this fact be remembered by the champions of that cause. Let them laugh as they like at a national conscience; but let them know that their arguments, their eloquence, their conspiracy would have been utterly ineffectual if they had not enlisted it on their side.

Then came the year 1848. The throne which had relied most upon the support of the middle class, the throne which had aimed most steadily and exclusively at the promotion of material interests, the throne which enlightened doctrinaires had supported mainly because they looked upon it as the one barrier against absolutism and democracy, fell down as if it had been a house of cards; and most of the thrones in Europe shook or fell as if they were built of cards also. What did this earthquake mean? There were those who interpreted it thus: "Hitherto," they said, "democracy has been invad"ing only institutions-monarchies, aris"tocracies, churches. Now it is ap'proaching the heart of society. Now "it is threatening property. Now then "is the time for all who have property, "however little they may care for