as the orator Henry Vincent,
afterward well known in America.

The agitation for reform spread far and wide. The people seemed to be
about to rise _en masse_. The powers of British society were shaken
and alarmed. The authorities put out their hands and the Chartist
meetings in many places were broken up. The leading spirits were
seized and thrown into prison for nothing. Three of the agitators were
sent to the penal colonies, for no other offence than the delivery of
democratic speeches. For several years the movement was in abeyance,
but in 1848, in the month of April, the agitation broke out afresh and
rose to a formidable climax. A great meeting was appointed for the
Kensington common, and there, on the tenth of the month just named, a
monster demonstration was held. A petition had meanwhile been drawn
up, praying for reform, and was _signed by nearly two million
Englishmen_!

After this the Chartist agitation ebbed away. The movement was said to
be a failure; but it failed, not because of the political principles
on which it was founded, but because those principles had in the
meantime been acknowledged and applied. At least three of the six
articles of the Chartist charter were soon adopted by Parliament. The
principle of Manhood Suffrage is virtually a part of the English
Constitution. The right of voting by Secret Ballot, deposited in a
ballot-box, has also been acknowledged as a part of the _modus
operandi_ of all British elections. In like manner the Property
Qualification formerly imposed on candidates for Parliament, against
which the Chartists so vehemently and justly declaimed, has long since
been abolished.

THE ABOLITION OF HUMAN BONDAGE.

Certainly no greater deed of philanthropy has been accomplished by
mankind than the extinction of human servitude. True, that horrible
relic of antiquity has not yet been wholly obliterated from the world,
but the nineteenth century has dealt upon it such staggering and fatal
blows as have driven it from all the high places of civilization and
made it crouch in obscure corners and unenlightened regions on the
outskirts of paganism. Slavery has not indeed been extinguished; but
it is scotched, and must expire. According to the tendency of things,
the sun in his course at the middle of the twentieth century will
hardly light the hovel of a single slave!

The opening of the modern era found slavery universally distributed.
There was perhaps at the middle of the e