well ever designated as robbery, even by those who most
abhorred his name? Everybody knows that the unsparing manner in which he
disfranchised small boroughs was emulously applauded, by royalists, who
hated him for having pulled down one dynasty, and by republicans, who
hated him for having founded another. Take Sir Harry Vane and Lord
Clarendon, both wise men, both, I believe, in the main, honest men, but
as much opposed to each other in politics as wise and honest men
could be. Both detested Oliver; yet both approved of Oliver's plan of
parliamentary reform. They grieved only that so salutary a change should
have been made by an usurper. Vane wished it to have been made by the
Rump; Clarendon wished it to be made by the King. Clarendon's language
on this subject is most remarkable. For he was no rash innovator.
The bias of his mind was altogether on the side of antiquity and
prescription. Yet he describes that great disfranchisement of boroughs
as an improvement fit to be made in a more warrantable method and at a
better time. This is that better time. What Cromwell attempted to effect
by an usurped authority, in a country which had lately been convulsed
by civil war, and which was with difficulty kept in a state of sullen
tranquillity by military force, it has fallen to our lot to accomplish
in profound peace, and under the rule of a prince whose title is
unquestioned, whose office is reverenced, and whose person is beloved.
It is easy to conceive with what scorn and astonishment Clarendon would
have heard it said that the reform which seemed to him so obviously just
and reasonable that he praised it, even when made by a regicide, could
not, without the grossest iniquity, be made even by a lawful King and a
lawful Parliament.

Sir, in the name of the institution of property, of that great
institution, for the sake of which, chiefly, all other institutions
exist, of that great institution to which we owe all knowledge, all
commerce, all industry, all civilisation, all that makes us to differ
from the tattooed savages of the Pacific Ocean, I protest against the
pernicious practice of ascribing to that which is not property the
sanctity which belongs to property alone. If, in order to save political
abuses from that fate with which they are threatened by the public
hatred, you claim for them the immunities of property, you must expect
that property will be regarded with some portion of the hatred which is
excited by pol