ade clear
By the irresistible strength of beer,"

are beyond salvation: there is no hope for this generation of them. But
South Essex is not so hopelessly lost to the people's cause. It is true
that last summer it did unseat Sir E. N. Buxton, and return Sir W. B.
Smijth by a majority of 600; but the National has purchased 242 acres in
that county, and out of that number can create 1,210 electors.
Evidently, then, there is hope for Essex yet. But we need not continue
this scrutiny. The people have placed within their hands the very
privilege they so much desire. They need not wait for Government to
emancipate them; they can emancipate themselves. For instance, the
National will put any person desirous of the same in possession of a
county qualification for North or South Essex, East or West Kent,
Hertfordshire, West Sussex, North Hants, North Lancashire, or Middlesex.
If, as some of the knowing ones maintain, we shall soon have a general
election, of course the sooner one is put on the register the better. If
not, the purchaser can take no harm: he will have his _quid pro quo_; he
will have placed his money in that best of all banks, the land, and will
have become one of that important class appealed to on certain occasions
as the "Electors of the United Kingdom." Heaven helps those who help
themselves. Instead of the people waiting for Government to extend the
franchise, they can boldly help themselves. No man deserves the
electoral privilege who cannot purchase it by his own industry and
self-denial. At the present time, when provisions are cheap, when work
is abundant, when wages are high and labour scarce, there is not a man in
our streets who may not win the franchise if he has the will. Half the
men who brawled in low pot-houses, while their wives and children were
starving, over their beer, for the Charter, and nothing but the Charter,
if they had stopped at home, and worked and saved their money, might, by
this time, have realised the manhood suffrage of which they so idly
dreamed; and if, at the next election, the men of progress are beaten,
and the friends of class legislation and injustice prevail, it will be
because the people were not true to themselves--because they had not
enough of self-denial, enough of earnestness and independence, to avail
themselves of the advantages offered by the Freehold Land Movement, and
thus to have a representation that shall be real, and not a sham. By
means o