he common people makes the property, the limbs, the lives
of all classes insecure. Without the shadow of a grievance, at the
summons of a madman, a hundred thousand people rise in insurrection.
During a whole week, there is anarchy in the greatest and wealthiest
of European cities. The parliament is besieged. Your predecessor sits
trembling in his chair, and expects every moment to see the door beaten
in by the ruffians whose roar he hears all round the house. The peers
are pulled out of their coaches. The bishops in their lawn are forced to
fly over the tiles. The chapels of foreign ambassadors, buildings made
sacred by the law of nations, are destroyed. The house of the Chief
Justice is demolished. The little children of the Prime Minister are
taken out of their beds and laid in their night clothes on the table of
the Horse Guards, the only safe asylum from the fury of the rabble. The
prisons are opened. Highwaymen, housebreakers, murderers, come forth
to swell the mob by which they have been set free. Thirty-six fires are
blazing at once in London. Then comes the retribution. Count up all the
wretches who were shot, who were hanged, who were crushed, who drank
themselves to death at the rivers of gin which ran down Holborn Hill;
and you will find that battles have been lost and won with a smaller
sacrifice of life. And what was the cause of this calamity, a calamity
which, in the history of London, ranks with the great plague and the
great fire? The cause was the ignorance of a population which had been
suffered, in the neighbourhood of palaces, theatres, temples, to grow up
as rude and stupid as any tribe of tattooed cannibals in New Zealand, I
might say as any drove of beasts in Smithfield Market.

The instance is striking: but it is not solitary. To the same cause are
to be ascribed the riots of Nottingham, the sack of Bristol, all the
outrages of Ludd, and Swing, and Rebecca, beautiful and costly machinery
broken to pieces in Yorkshire, barns and haystacks blazing in Kent,
fences and buildings pulled down in Wales. Could such things have been
done in a country in which the mind of the labourer had been opened by
education, in which he had been taught to find pleasure in the exercise
of his intellect, taught to revere his Maker, taught to respect
legitimate authority, and taught at the same time to seek the redress of
real wrongs by peaceful and constitutional means?

This then is my argument. It is the duty of Go