the liberty of our fellow citizens, punishing
honest magistrates for not perjuring themselves. Are these trifles? And
can we believe that you really feel a horror of open questions when we
see your Prime Minister elect sending people to prison overnight,
and his law officers elect respectfully attending the levee of those
prisoners the next morning? Observe, too, that this question of
privileges is not merely important; it is also pressing. Something must
be done, and that speedily. My belief is that more inconvenience would
follow from leaving that question open one month than from leaving the
question of the Ballot open ten years.

The Ballot, Sir, is not the only subject on which I am accused of
holding dangerous opinions. The right honourable Baronet the Member
for Pembroke (Sir James Graham.) pronounces the present Government
a Chartist Government; and he proves his point by saying that I am a
member of the government, and that I wish to give the elective franchise
to every ten pound householder, whether his house be in a town or in
the country. Is it possible, Sir, that the honourable Baronet should not
know that the fundamental principle of the plan of government called the
People's Charter is that every male of twenty-one should have a vote?
Or is it possible that he can see no difference between giving the
franchise to all ten pound householders, and giving the franchise to all
males of twenty-one? Does he think the ten pound householders a class
morally or intellectually unfit to possess the franchise, he who bore a
chief part in framing the law which gave them the franchise in all the
represented towns of the United Kingdom? Or will he say that the ten
pound householder in a town is morally and intellectually fit to be
an elector, but that the ten pound householder who lives in the
open country is morally and intellectually unfit? Is not house-rent
notoriously higher in towns than in the country? Is it not, therefore,
probable that the occupant of a ten pound house in a rural hamlet will
be a man who has a greater stake in the peace and welfare of society
than a man who has a ten pound house in Manchester or Birmingham? Can
you defend on conservative principles an arrangement which gives votes
to a poorer class and withholds them from a richer? For my own part, I
believe it to be essential to the welfare of the state, that the elector
should have a pecuniary qualification. I believe that the ten pound
qualif