212 The Artizans' and Labourers' Dwellings Bill. [April, 



action, all possible means are being taken by the representatives of 

 the people to prepare the future electors for their privileges, by 

 raising their mental intelligence, as well as their physical condition. 



Two phases of legislative activity present themselves pro- 

 minently to the observer of social affairs ; the one (hardly yet 

 commenced) is compulsory education, and generally the extension 

 of education amongst the masses ; the other, compulsory obedience 

 to social and sanitary laws. 



When we say that there are thousands of electors living in 

 houses, in which it is absolutely impossible that their bodies, much 

 less their minds, can be maintained in healthy action, and that 

 there are tens of thousands still unenfranchised who dwell in hovels 

 compared with which the huts in some of M. du Chaillu's Ashango 

 villages must be palaces, we are only re-stating facts which are 

 revealed in every page of history j and to the man of science, the 

 most hopeful feature in the present political crisis is that the privi- 

 lege of electoral power cannot fail to be accompanied by a sense of 

 pride which will stimulate its possessors to improve their own social 

 condition ; and in one respect there is an advantage in the w T ork of 

 Parliamentary Reform being undertaken by the Conservatives. It 

 is they who have always sought to withhold the franchise from the 

 masses, because they considered them unfitted to receive it; and 

 therefore, unless they mean to belie their first principles, and to 

 leave it in the power of their adversaries to taunt them with 

 insincerity, and with a desire to keep the people in a state of 

 vassalage, they must not only raise them in the political, but also 

 in the social, scale. 



"Whatever may hitherto have been the opinions of men in 

 regard to political enfranchisement — that is to say, whether they 

 have thought the people should be improved before they were per- 

 mitted to have a voice in the government of the country, or that 

 they should be at once allowed to vote for such representatives as 

 they presume to have their interests at heart in a superior degree 

 to those in whose election they have had no voice — one thing is 

 quite certain, namely, that their social condition should be improved, 

 and that all political and religious denominations should join 

 earnestly and disinterestedly in the noble work of social and intel- 

 lectual enfranchisement. 



We must, on this great question, utter no uncertain sound. 



It is we who are answerable for the degraded condition of those 

 fellow-citizens whom we pronounce to be unfitted for the elective 

 franchise. It is vain for representative bodies, local or imperial, to 

 say that the drunkenness, uncleanliness, or poverty of the people is 

 their own fault, and they must be made to suffer the consequences. 

 Such statements are simply admissions of ignorance, incapacity, and 

 unfitness for office, on the part of those who make them • and the 



