at severe discipline of our public schools,
which makes mere lads often fit to govern, because they have learnt to
obey: while they develop later--generally not till middle age--in the
classes who have not gone through in their youth that Spartan training,
and who indeed (from a mistaken conception of liberty) would not endure
it for a day. This and other social drawbacks which are but too patent,
retard the manhood of the working classes. That it should be so, is a
wrong. For if a citizen have one right above all others to demand
anything of his country, it is that he should be educated; that whatever
capabilities he may have in him, however small, should have their fair
and full chance of development. But the cause of the wrong is not the
existence of a caste, or a privileged class, or of anything save the
plain fact, that some men will be always able to pay more for their
children's education than others; and that those children will,
inevitably, win in the struggle of life.

Meanwhile, in this fact is to be found the most weighty, if not the only
argument against manhood suffrage, which would admit many--but too many,
alas!--who are still mere boys in mind. To a reasonable household
suffrage it cannot apply. The man who (being almost certainly married,
and having children) can afford to rent a 5 pound tenement in a town, or
in the country either, has seen quite enough of life, and learnt quite
enough of it, to form a very fair judgment of the man who offers to
represent him in Parliament; because he has learnt, not merely something
of his own interest, or that of his class, but--what is infinitely more
important--the difference between the pretender and the honest man.

The causes of this state of society, which is peculiar to Britain, must
be sought far back in the ages. It would seem that the distinction
between "earl and churl" (the noble and the non-noble freeman) was
crushed out in this island by the two Norman conquests--that of the Anglo-
Saxon nobility by Sweyn and Canute; and that of the Anglo-Danish nobility
by William and his Frenchmen. Those two terrible calamities, following
each other in the short space of fifty years, seem to have welded
together, by a community of suffering, all ranks and races, at least
south of the Tweed; and when the English rose after the storm, they rose
as one homogeneous people, never to be governed again by an originally
alien race. The English nobility were, from th