ment,
wealth, or anything else, will always be able to influence a number of
men--and if he thinks it worth his while, of votes--by just and lawful
means. And as for unjust and unlawful means, let those who prefer them
keep up heart. The world will go on much as it did before; and be always
quite bad enough to allow bribery and corruption, jobbery and nepotism,
quackery and arrogance, their full influence over our home and foreign
policy. An extension of the suffrage, however wide, will not bring about
the millennium. It will merely make a large number of Englishmen
contented and loyal, instead of discontented and disloyal. It may make,
too, the educated and wealthy classes wiser by awakening a wholesome
fear--perhaps, it may be, by awakening a chivalrous emulation. It may
put the younger men of the present aristocracy upon their mettle, and
stir them up to prove that they are not in the same effete condition as
was the French noblesse in 1789. It may lead them to take the warnings
which have been addressed to them, for the last thirty years, by their
truest friends--often by kinsmen of their own. It may lead them to ask
themselves why, in a world which is governed by a just God, such great
power as is palpably theirs at present is entrusted to them, save that
they may do more work, and not less, than other men, under the penalties
pronounced against those to whom much is given, and of whom much is
required. It may lead them to discover that they are in a world where it
is not safe to sit under the tree, and let the ripe fruit drop into your
mouth; where the "competition of species" works with ruthless energy
among all ranks of being, from kings upon their thrones to the weeds upon
the waste; where "he that is not hammer, is sure to be anvil;" and he who
will not work, neither shall he eat. It may lead them to devote that
energy (in which they surpass so far the continental aristocracies) to
something better than outdoor amusements or indoor dilettantisms. There
are those among them who, like one section of the old French noblesse,
content themselves with mere complaints of "the revolutionary tendencies
of the age." Let them beware in time; for when the many are on the
march, the few who stand still are certain to be walked over. There are
those among them who, like another section of the French noblesse, are
ready, more generously than wisely, to throw away their own social and
political advantages, and play