directed with unceasing vigilance; which should be left wide open to every man's view, and never again lost sight of: the ulterior incidents arising out of this gradual change must be regulated by concurrent circumstances, the operators must be guided by occurrences as they successively present themselves."

LETTER XXIII.

"THE old question, 'Who's to begin?' is similar to that raised between our two great political parties, the Whigs and Tories: the Whigs cry, 'Put down the rotten boroughs.'—'What barefaced impudence!' sneer the Tories, who advocate the necessity of their existence, 'why you who raise the cry, are yourselves sitting in Parliament, returned for many of these very boroughs: do, pray, set the example of opening your own corruption first.'-' No:' rejoin the Whigs, and very justly, 'we shall do no such thing as it is, we can scarce make a stand against you in the national assembly: if we parted with those, we should lose our representation, and even the little influence we possess now. Nevertheless, we deprecate this system of foul corruption and intrigue, and only want to obtain an enactment of the State to put it down entirely; then we shall be all on a par, then all parties will start fairly together; but you must be fools to imagine we shall part, exclusively of your doing so, with that which keeps us in existence ;

even though we may abhor as pernicious and vile, the principle on which it is founded.

"I do verily believe, that if our monopolizers could catch air, one of the pabula of life, as they seize on surface, they would bottle and sell it retail, as they do the latter: happily it is of a nature which eludes their grasp; certainly not from want of good-will in them to forestal it. But the last and most important point which I would suggest to the exclusive possessors is this: Had you not better part with a good grace, with some of that which, after all the questions raised on it, is of so precarious a tenure, that you never will be able to hold it in security but for a few generations? which will be infallibly taken from you by force, and yourselves treated contumeliously withal? Would it not be wiser to throw more into hotchpot, as our old legal phrase is, to throw such monstrous inequality into a lump, and each draw forth a fairer portion? Had you not better make a merit of necessity, especially as this excess of possession has palled on the senses, has devoured you with a chagrin, a weariness and satiety, which cause you to hate your own couch of down, and envy the pallet of labour?

"When such queries as these are put to the rich, a few muse and ponder; many scoff

in hysteric derision; and those who vaunt in fancied superiority of right feeling, ask, 'What mean you by our being ejected from the seats of our ancestors, from those domains which are as much our right and inheritance as the rood of garden-ground is the labourer's?' I would calmly answer, “I mean this; that Revolution is the never-failing result of excessive gradation. I mean to say, that every inch of ground, which every one of you possess over and above what would suffice to support you and your children in necessary food and clothing, is primâ facie an infringement on natural law. Can you disprove that assertion? It is in vain that you talk of bounty to numerous dependants, of ancient services rendered to your country, of patents of nobility; these are are all artificial relations. I can listen to them, can make all allowance to the frail emotion of regret, at the idea of spoliation, which prompts this enumeration; but when re-action throws off the yoke of rule, when anarchy thunders at your defenceless gates, when the physical force of numbers of the people, so long, so madly set at nought, grown drunk with their oppressors' blood, revelling in all the delirium of revenge, when they proscribe their victims for slaughter, who shall deliver you? who shall erase your

names from the list of vengeance? what will prayer and repentance avail with a populace who have once tasted blood? Then will you begin to cry, and the cry is that of Nature, 'Take our lands, our mansions, our wealth; we freely give them, only spare our lives:' 'No,' say the people, reeling in the intoxication of success, we will now have all; comrades, strike home, these are the deathblows of slavery:' and the knife is driven to the haft.

"Will any one contend, this bloodshed is not the result immediate or more distant, of excessive gradation? Let him turn to the revolution of his own times, that of France; let him read there, if honours, titles, wealth, even disinterested virtue itself, weighed a feather, when the balance of public opinion once kicked the beam: and what was the conséquence? No efforts of the vindicators of Nature, of the band of philosophic philanthropists with whom France was at that period teeming, could restore equipoise. A bloodthirsty, remorseless faction, seized the reins of power, wallowed in gore, and sacrificed in frantic fury, without distinction, all who stood in the gap to oppose them. Multitudes have had the effrontery to assert (to what length of assertion will not bigotry and prejudice go)