ether he is one of ourselves or not, wastes our
time in boasting or flattery, I say, let us hiss him. If we have the
beginning of wisdom, which is, to know a little truth about ourselves, we
know that as a body we are neither very wise nor very virtuous. And to
prove this, I will not point specially to our own habits and doings, but
to the general state of the country. Any nation that had within it a
majority of men--and we are the majority--possessed of much wisdom and
virtue, would not tolerate the bad practices, the commercial lying and
swindling, the poisonous adulteration of goods, the retail cheating, and
the political bribery which are carried on boldly in the midst of us. A
majority has the power of creating a public opinion. We could groan and
hiss before we had the franchise: if we had groaned and hissed in the
right place, if we had discerned better between good and evil, if the
multitude of us artisans, and factory hands, and miners, and laborers of
all sorts, had been skilful, faithful, well-judging, industrious,
sober--and I don't see how there can be wisdom and virtue anywhere
without these qualities--we should have made an audience that would have
shamed the other classes out of their share in the national vices. We
should have had better members of Parliament, better religious teachers,
honester tradesmen, fewer foolish demagogues, less impudence in infamous
and brutal men; and we should not have had among us the abomination of
men calling themselves religious while living in splendor on ill-gotten
gains. I say, it is not possible for any society in which there is a
very large body of wise and virtuous men to be as vicious as our society
is--to have as low a standard of right and wrong, to have so much belief
in falsehood, or to have so degrading, barbarous a notion of what
pleasure is, or of what justly raises a man above his fellows.
Therefore, let us have none with this nonsense about our being much
better than the rest of our countryman, or the pretence that that was a
reason why we ought to have such an extension of the franchise as has
been given to us. The reason for our having the franchise, as I want
presently to show, lies somewhere else than in our personal good
qualities, and does not in the least lie in any high betting chance that
a delegate is a better man than a duke, or that a Sheffield grinder is a
better man than any one of the firm he works for.

However, we have got our franc