Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/122

 If they know how to choose their legislators, and are resolute to enforce the law, they will have both. But if, from ignorance, corruption, or other causes, they know not how to make a proper choice, they will but have escaped Scylla to fall into Charybdis, and, mayhap, make bad worse. The very men they elect to save them may prove their direst enemies. These, with the aid (out of doors) of the ignorant and depraved of all classes, may accomplish the ruin of their best friends, and then (as the French Convention did, after murdering Robespierre) destroy universal suffrage itself, under pretence that it had led to nothing but folly, blood, and crime. These are no imaginary suppositions. We are but supposing for England, and the present time, what has heretofore occurred in most other countries and in all times under similar circumstances. A people ignorant of their true political and social rights will never elect a Parliament of real political and social reformers; they will only elect declaiming demagogues and crafty adventurers, who will promise everything and perform nothing,—who, professing to be doing everything for the people, will, in reality, do nothing for them but make them stepping-stones to their own aggrandisement, and who, as usual, beginning with frightening the aristocracies of land and money, will end with compromising and going shares with them for the public spoil, after establishing a reign of terror over the people for their own conjoint security. How easily might we demonstrate this by à priori reasoning, were it necessary. The history of all past revolutions, however, dispenses with any such necessity. Indeed, the bare fact that universal suffrage is nowhere to be found now-a-days amongst those ancient states and communities where it formerly flourished is proof sufficient. A truly intelligent people would ever remain a self-governing people. A people fully conscious of the value of their political and social rights could never lose the franchise. In the first place, they would so use it as to remove or prevent the growth of those unnatural interests and institutes which are incompatible with its free exercise and permanent security. In the next place, they would use it to establish the social rights of the people upon a basis as broad as the population itself. And, lastly, they would so know how to appreciate the blessings of self-government, from a consciousness that they owed their liberties and happiness to no other source, that they would fight like lions, and die to a man, rather than surrender their franchises. Such a people might be exterminated; it could not be enslaved or disfranchised. Xerxes, with his innumerable hordes, was not a match for a few thousand Greeks inspired with the love of freedom. A Persian army could not force the pass of Thermopylæ against three hundred freemen under Leonidas, till treachery leagued with numbers for his over-*throw; and even then the handful of freemen had to be exterminated, because they could not be taken alive, nor subdued to slavery. We have a still more striking example of this in the present day. Of all the European States that enjoyed universal suffrage a few years ago, France is now the only one in which it