ble. On the other hand, I hold that we have owed to agitation a
long series of beneficent reforms which could have been effected in no
other way. Nor do I understand how any person can reprobate agitation,
merely as agitation, unless he is prepared to adopt the maxim of Bishop
Horsley, that the people have nothing to do with the laws but to
obey them. The truth is that agitation is inseparable from popular
government. If you wish to get rid of agitation, you must establish an
oligarchy like that of Venice, or a despotism like that of Russia. If
a Russian thinks that he is able to suggest an improvement in the
commercial code or the criminal code of his country, he tries to obtain
an audience of the Emperor Nicholas or of Count Nesselrode. If he
can satisfy them that his plans are good, then undoubtedly, without
agitation, without controversy in newspapers, without harangues from
hustings, without clamorous meetings in great halls and in marketplaces,
without petitions signed by tens of thousands, you may have a reform
effected with one stroke of the pen. Not so here. Here the people, as
electors, have power to decide questions of the highest importance. And
ought they not to hear and read before they decide? And how can they
hear if nobody speaks, or read if nobody writes? You must admit,
then, that it is our right, and that it may be our duty, to attempt
by speaking and writing to induce the great body of our countrymen to
pronounce what we think a right decision; and what else is agitation? In
saying this I am not defending one party alone. Has there been no Tory
agitation? No agitation against Popery? No agitation against the new
Poor Law? No agitation against the plan of education framed by the
present Government? Or, to pass from questions about which we differ to
questions about which we all agree: Would the slave trade ever have
been abolished without agitation? Would slavery ever have been abolished
without agitation? Would your prison discipline ever have been improved
without agitation? Would your penal code, once the scandal of the
Statute Book, have been mitigated without agitation? I am far from
denying that agitation may be abused, may be employed for bad ends, may
be carried to unjustifiable lengths. So may that freedom of speech
which is one of the most precious privileges of this House. Indeed,
the analogy is very close. What is agitation but the mode in which the
public, the body which we represent, the