Page:Reform or revolution.djvu/7

7 places for a quarter of a million of men, but Hyde Park is the best, because you can see us meet, and you can judge whether the unenfranchised returning home from a political gathering are worse conducted than yourselves coming back from the Derby or a prize fight, and at our meetings in future one proposition, at least, will be prominent, viz., that you, my Lords and Gentlemen, having persistently refused reform—you having refused to listen to our remonstrances, and having denied our ability to enforce our wishes, it is our duty to commence some more effective agitation against you; and one of the steps of open hostility to you will be the proposal that the people refuse to be robbed any longer in the name of a government which ignores their existence except as taxpayers.

At the present moment in Great Britain, where vast wealth and frightful poverty jostle in the streets, an enormous amount of taxation, much of which is extravagantly and uselessly expended, is levied on the country, and the great share of this burden of taxation ultimately and truly falls upon the unrepresented millions. Taxation is a boastful performance for a legislature and ministry who sit without consulting the mass of the people; it is a baneful subject for a people powerless in the State. To tax a man without his concurrence, without listening to his objections, without his having any voice in the nomination of the tax leviers, is clearly robbery, and if you will not be honest, the people must refuse to be robbed. If you will not reform the representation, then the unenfranchised taxpayers will revolt. If they must not have the right to vote, they will not regard it as a duty to pay. Our revolution can legitimately commence by cutting off the supplies, and this may be done by turning the tax-gatherer from the door from one end of England to the other. All imperial rates might be resolutely refused, and as large landowners might increase their rentals to meet extraordinary taxation, it would become necessary to take measures to prevent the continuance of any indirect taxation until a real Reform measure be carried. Then, my Lords and Gentlemen, if you choose to remain obstructives, you can sustain the expenditure of the Crown, the army and navy, and pay your own pensions by contributions from your own purses. Perhaps you