December, a jury under the direction of Lord Kenyon found him guilty of writing a "wicked and seditious libel;" which was followed by a series of prosecutions and convictions against the vendors of the book. In the Convention Paine opposed the execution of Louis. Soon after a decree was passed, expelling foreigners from the Convention; and Paine was arrested, in consequence of an application to the Committee of Public Safety. He remained a prisoner for eleven months. During his confinement he wrote a great part of his Age of Reason, which was published in Paris, in 1794-5. On his liberation he was invited to reassume his seat in the National Convention, of which he continued to be a member till June, 1795. About the same time with the Age of Reason he published his Dissertation on the First Principles of Government, An Essay on Finance, Agrarian Justice, the Address to the Theo-philanthropists, and several other pamphlets. Toward the close of 1802 he returned to America. In 1807 he published his last work, An Examination of the passages called Prophecies, and an Essay on Dreams. From this time he resided in New York or on his estate at New Rochelle. Age and infirmity were stealing fast upon him. He was labouring under a confirmed dropsy: neglected by his former political friends, who inconsistently objected to his religious sincerity; tormented by bigots, who desired to worry him into a recantation. On the 8th of June, 1809, in his seventy-third year, the sturdy wrestler with abuse, the unflinching assertor of Truth, after three weeks of severest pain, died, uncomforted and friendless, yet placidly and in full possession of his faculties. He was interred in his own farm at New Rochelle, having been refused a grave in the Quakers' burial-ground. One of the People.

POPULAR FITNESS FOR FREEDOM.

IN ANSWER TO CERTAIN POLITICIANS (LIBERALS "AND ELSE") WHO

WOULD PUT OFF JUSTICE.

SIX men are living upon a small island. One of them, pretending a divine revelation, claims particular immunities and supreme authority over the other five. For a time his assumption remains unquestioned: at length it occurs to the five that they are imposed upon; and they demand an equalization of power and privilege. The privileged, thereupon, admits one of the five to a share in his power, and requires that this shall be considered a final measure. The remaining four, not perceiving how they are bettered by this arrangement, continue their application for an equality of influence; and in reply are told to prove their fitness for the possession of this influence. What will be their answer to the self-qualified rulers? What but this-Who made you the judges of our fitness? Rather do you, who arrogate a superior authority, prove your fitness: prove also our unfitness, you who deprive us of a natural right! We claim no more than Nature gave us: do you, who would disqualify us, prove your better qualification!

The above is an illustration of the point on which the Nation is now at issue; it is the question between the represented, the domineering classes who by the " grace of God"-as a swindler or pickpocket might say-have somehow obtained exclusive possession of the government of the Nation, and the unrepresented, the majority of unprivileged men who hitherto have been supine enough to suffer the usurpation of a faction. What are you, Men of the governing class! that you should deprive any of the rights that Nature gives them, on any presumption of unfitness or incapacity? Who made you the judges of a nation's morality or intelligence, the licensers of every man's interference in the management of his own affairs, the dispensers of the nation's wealth? How came you by this exclusive faculty of right reasoning and moral action this monopoly of power, this "vested right" of engrossing

for your own use the product of a nation's labour? Answer, you who pretend to be exceptions from the common lot, or rather who, being but a fraction of the whole, would constitute yourselves the rule and condemn the majority as exceptionable! answer to the demand of an awakened Nation, answer to the demand of the Many, when and how you were made superior to your fellowmen? What! shall the Many resign the rights of their humanity to the insolent dictation of the Few; or only be allowed to exercise them on proving their fitness, to the satisfaction of these self-constituted arbitrators? Our rights are the gift of God: we seek no favours from human usurpation; nor need we prove our fitness to exercise these rights: but we demand from you, who rob us of our birthright, some reason for your robbery. You answer, your superior fitness. Prove it! We, the majority, deny it: we will not allow that you have clearer perceptions or are more unbiassed judges than we. Is it necessary, too, that we should prove our capability of right reasoning, must we prove that we can talk to some good purpose, before we shall be allowed by the judgment of self-throned despotism to speak or to argue? The one tyranny is not a whit more monstrous or more absurd than the other. If therefore, instead of violently enforcing the restitution of those natural rights of which by force or the fraud of tyrannic custom we have been so long deprived, we hesitate not to expostulate with tyranny, calmly arguing for the rationality and justice of our claims, it is not that we allow the right of the usurper to sit in judgment thereon, but that we would discountenance all appeals to brute force; that, doubly strong in the justice of our cause and the might of united numbers, we will not stoop to imitation of our spoilers; nor degrade the reason of humanity by submitting truth and justice to the arbitration of the sword. Look, then, upon our claims to moral and intellectual qualification for the right use of our just share in the government of the community; examine for you have not yet examined-as dispassionately as the prejudices of accustomed interest may permit, our fitness to be enfranchised more especially I address myself to you who, acknowledging the abstract justice of our demand, would have us to wait till your unwilling and sluggish perception shall deem us sufficiently qualified to possess the privilege of freemen; who, in your anxiety for the "quiet progression" of humanity, would take it under your especial tutelage, keeping it in leading-strings until your privilege-fed apathy should have the leisure to discern its all-sufficing power of advancing even without your assistance or encouragement.

We will prove, then, our fitness, our moral and intellectual fitness-not meaning thereby that there is no room for improvement, but simply that we are at least as well qualified for the possession of the franchise as those now enfranchised. First, as to our moral fitness :-Is the acquirement of wealth so strictly honest a procedure that it should be deemed an all-sufficient education for honesty; or, is the possession of property a sure prevention of fraud? Are forgery and peculation the peculiar crimes of the labouring poor; or, is falsehood confined to the hut and haunts of poverty? There is less dishonesty among the working classes than among the middle classes or the aristocracy; but the petty offences which want has compelled are fiercely punished and virulently published, while the extensive frauds and continual falsehoods of the Respectables are legalized or licensed, the offenders being the law-makers: yet turn to the Calendar, and you will see that even by that, their own partial account, the respectable law-makers are in no respect more moral than their slaves, the Unenfranchised. True, they do not poach—but they have robbed the community of their universal right to the wild animal; they do not fire ricks-but they bury corn in their granaries while the people starve; they are not so often punished for bastardy or desertion of their families—yet they have not fewer mistresses or bastards; they may not rob on the highway— but they can cheat in the shop, or over-reach in the counting-house, or swindle on the race-course or in the gaming-house, or pick pockets for the use of the church, and crowd prisons with bankrupt debtors, and shoot men for tithes or excise-duties; they may not be so often hanged for murder-yet duels are

41

confined to the respectable classes, and the planning and perpetration of wholesale murder, under the name of war, is exclusively their design and ordering. When had the working man so little regard for human liberty that he would imprison his fellow-man for the not immoral act of shooting a hare; or, when was he so careless of human life that he would murder a debtor in the name of religion? Are the labouring classes so brutalized that their women take delight in field-sports, finding pleasure in the agonies of hares and foxes, as some well-born ladies are wont to do? It was the monied class that raised that unchristian and brutal cheer for war, that exulting shout for murder, which filled the Stock Exchange of London when the Amiens was violated in 1802; it was the respectable class that carried on the horrible slave-trade, that most infamous traffic in human blood, when men of peace and women chained together or crammed into hogsheads were drowned by hundreds, when some were murdered to be food for the rest, and even worse atrocities took place, atrocities which words may not describe; it is the middle class and aristocracy which by their seductions supply that most loathsome pool of prostitution which ever putrifies beneath the homes of society, corrupting the heart of humanity, and poisoning the very air we breathe; it is the respectable class that gives the right hand of fellowship to well-dressed depravity; it is the respectable class that refuses to honour virtue unless paid for their homage, nay, that punishes it as a crime unless it can bribe them to toleration of its uprightness. population with unfitness? Are these our accusers, our well-qualified judges? Are these the men to taunt the labouring Come forward, ye who dare to accuse us of unfitness! confess your own lives, and shew us in what manner your superior morality has been displayed. You dread "the violence of a furious democracy," you fear "the unruly and insolent vengeance of a sanguinary mob:"-Tell us what act of popular madness ever equalled the premeditated infamy of Waterloo or Copenhagen, of the vale of Glencoe or more recent Canada. Ye fear because the atrocity of your own crimes has disabled you from holding faith in pity, and ye know that ye merit vengeance. Ye need not fear. Humanity, uncorrupted by the abuse of wealth and power, cannot be inhuman: it may be goaded into a temporary frenzy-beware therefore of too much exasperating the sufferers already overladen with wrongs!—but, as it has not known the corruptions of wealth or tyranny, it may not exercise the consequent crimes; it is free from their infirmities. Thus do your vices, O tyrants! exceed the vices of your slaves.

And there are virtues in which poverty may put wealth to the blush. How many men are there whose lives from childhood to grey death are one continual toil: yet will such men go on, "never relaxing though never in health, conscious that their means can never be increased, nor their families over adequately supplied; apprehensive of failing altogether to supply them even with food, yet drudging on in this hopeless state, unknown and unheeded, quiet and composed as they are miserable, doing no harm to any, and ready to advise and assist others in every way men so circumstanced are capable."* Pampered slave of wealth! is not this a high morality? "The women are even in a worse condition than the men; they have the care of the children, they are worn to the bone with breeding, nursing, care, anxiety and privation. Yet it is not more remarkable than true, that, with few exceptions, they never give up in despair; so long as the man holds on the woman holds to him and the children, until she is destroyed; even in death she never wholly succumbs, but in the anguish of her heart, amidst all manner of doubts and terrible forebodings, hopes that something good may happen to the children." Most noble rulers! if not too much disturbing the placidity of your selfindulgence, endeavour to appreciate the morality of your "inferiors!" "Their sympathies for persons similarly circumstanced with themselves, are continually shewn. Their actual services to one another in innumerable cases, are altogether unparalleled; efforts are made which seem incredible; sacrifices

From "The Morality of Poverty," by W. J. Fox.

of which they who are well off have no sort of conception; trouble is taken, anxiety is endured, gifts are bestowed, privations are borne, with a readiness truly admirable. Is a neighbour sick with some contagious disease even, they will nurse him or her. Has some particular misfortune fallen on some one, they will take away the children for a time, and feed them from their own scanty means; and in proportion to those means contribute in quantity and amount as none but themselves ever do, or ever contemplate doing." This is the plain unvarnished tale of a poor man. Thus act the sympathies of the poor. The rich, so called upon, would commit the self-sacrifice of gratifying his vanity by some very slight diminution of his usual folly and extravagance, trumpeting to the world his "charity" or, in some time of famine, content his indolent selfishness, like the French princess, with wondering why those who wanted bread did not feast upon buns. Let the wisest aristocrat that ever wore coronet, let the noblest of the wealth-educated look to democratic America, and bow to the better nobility of a Worcester or a Garrison, the apostles of peace and liberty!

With regard to the exercise of the franchise, for which you, the propertyqualified, deem us morally unfit-supposing the poor man liable to be bribed, who will be his tempter to dishonesty? There is greater want of probity in the briber than in the bribed; and poor, ay, most needy men, have been known to refuse all bribes. We at least shew a desire for probity: we would protect poor and threatened honesty by the Ballot. You, too, give your reluctant testimony to our greater love of truth, in that you would not allow the poor man to vote secretly: you call it an insult to him, while you have this "un-English" Ballot in every noble club, in all mercantile elections— out of regard to your own infirmities. Is your unassailed virtue so very weak? Give place to honester men!

Let us turn now to compare the intellect of the rich noble and the poor labourer. In a "Literary Chronology" in the "Companion to the Almanac" for the year 1832, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, a list of great writers for the last century, from 1700 to 1800, shows the following proportion of aristocratic talent:-In poetry and works of the imagination, among fifty-three names appears but one of the aristocracy; in history, but two among thirty-one; and in philosophy and science, but three among fifty-one. And Franklin was a journeyman printer, Burns a ploughman; and have we not Elliott, the iron-worker; and was not Cobbett, whose sturdy writings are an honour to our language, a gardener's boy. Was not Shakspere one of the enslaved and despised people, a poacher and "vagabond" player. Shall there be no intellect among the labouring poor, because they take no degrees at Oxford or Cambridge, at Newmarket or Crockford's? Is there no proof in the rise of Mechanics' Institutes, and in the universallyincreasing demand for books and newspapers? Surely it evidences as much intellect, as does the existence of those seminaries of irreligious and unsocial prejudices, the sectarian and exclusive Universities. There is some token of intellectual capability in the union of the masses for the attainment of their long-withheld rights; it is some proof of our fitness that we will not be diverted by the seductions of the hireling portion of the Press-no, not even by the exquisite sophistry of a Weekly Dispatch or a Times-from the one aim and object of our exertions.-But the obtuseness of selfish tyranny will not perceive our fitness for liberty till we shall prove it by possession and the uncontrolled exercise of our rights. Be ye then convinced by deeds, since ye will not hearken to reason? Tempt us not to rely longer upon your wisdom or your worth: we doubt both, even more than you doubt of us: we shall not believe you, nor even change our course, charm ye never so wisely. We know that Tithes are a shameful imposition; we feel the inhumanity of Corn-laws, and Poor-laws, and other laws of rich beneficence; we know that the People want Éducation:-but we also know that it is the (self-considered) interest of the governing factions to perpetuate their mis-rule by means of want and ignorance; we see that they may not be trusted to

remedy our evils: we therefore unite our universal energies to obtain political freedom, knowing that with this power, our equal right, we shall be able to palliate and in time effectually cure all the ills that afflict us. Again we declare that we seek no favours. We demand the restitution of a natural right of which you have robbed us. You sought not our suffrages for your fitness, when you usurped dominion over us : we shall hardly, save in charity to your wretched prejudices, wait for your sanction to reclaim our rights. SHALL FOUR MEN WAIT FOR THEIR OWN TILL THE TWO WHO ROBBED THEM SHALL THINK IT FITTING TO BE JUST? Listen to our answerponder it well, ere it be too late!-For the sake of peace we reason; for the sake of peaceful restitution, yet a little longer we suffer wrong. But the strength of justice and of power is with us; the Nation's will has gone forth: yet a little while, and we shall be free. Choose ye, for your own sakes, whether the olive or the laurel shall be the first garland on the brows of the Enfranchised People !-One of the People.

REVELATIONS OF TRUTH.

CHAP. III.

THE various evils are gathered around us: but the crowd is dense and innumerable; the foremost alone are visible. Look ye upon them!

I have seen millions of men, and among them the wise and noble and intelligent, bowing to the caprice of an ordinary child, of an idiot, of a beastly profligate, and of a raving madman.

I have looked upon the rulers of an enlightened country, chosen by a free people; and behold, they were of the very refuse, as if one had drawn them by lot from among the commonest: and the nation wondered exceedingly that their affairs were ill-executed.

I have beheld the senate-house of a great people: therein were assembled young men incapable of business and unable to judge between right and wrong, dishonest and debauched spendthrifts, fanatics, and men whose trade was murder, gamblers, horse-jockeys, blackguards and liars: and these were the framers and dispensers of the laws.

And behold, there are many men who toil not, who do nothing for the benefit of society; yet these men engross the greater portion of the fruit of Labour, while the producers starve uncomforted: and this is a sore evil.

And there is yet a greater evil, when those, who, self-devoted to severe pangs and life-destroying thought, through long endurance of heart-searing pain, have won for the community the deep-mined treasures of genius, allpowerful to assist and solace humanity, sink exhausted by the unremittal of exertion, and there is none to help them.

And the earnestnesss of good is thereby discouraged.

And I have seen that the laws of society are not the laws of Nature: for society hath many moralities. The morality of man, which is opposed to the morality of woman; the morality of public life, which is unsuited for a private station; religious morality; the morality of propriety and fashion; the morality of expedience. And Nature is consistent.

He who lieth is deemed well-mannered and polite : he who speaketh from his heart, be his words never so kind or wise, is answered with ridicule and contempt. He who accidentally offendeth against some conventional mode is pointed at as rude and vulgar: he who designedly breaketh and despiseth the laws of Nature is called a gentleman and esteemed an eligible companion.

He who robbeth on the highway from want of bread is condemned to death by the legislature that had exposed him to the temptation of poverty: he who robbeth his friend from want of other amusement, and murdereth him for complaining thereof, is preferred to judge the innocent, to make laws for the honest and industrious.