Wherever there is wanting a quick and universal exchange of thought there can be no sound public opinion. Where hindrances are placed upon the free exchange of views, either by heavy duties on newspapers, by dear postage, or by slow communications, public opinion must be a plant of low vitality and slow growth. Consequently, in the age preceding that of steam, so far as applied to locomotion, and to the telegraph, which age extended well into the present century, there was no rapid exchange of thought; new ideas were of slow propagation; there was little of that intellectual friction so productive of intellectual light among the masses. In these circumstances it is not surprising to read of things existing within the last hundred years which to-day could have no place in our national existence. Lord Cockburn, in the _Memorials of his Time_, gives the following instance. "I knew a case, several years after 1800," says he, "where the seat-holders of a town church applied to Government, which was the patron, for the promotion of the second clergyman, who had been giving great satisfaction for many years, and now, on the death of the first minister, it was wished that he should get the vacant place. The answer, written by a Member of the Cabinet, was that the single fact of the people having interfered so far as to express a wish was conclusive against what they desired; and another appointment was instantly made." Going back a little more than a hundred years, the following are specimens of the abuses then in full vigour. They are referred to in Trevelyan's _Early History of Charles James Fox_, the period in question being about 1750-60: "One nobleman had eight thousand a year in sinecures, and the colonelcies of three regiments. Another, an Auditor of the Exchequer, inside which he never looked, had L8000 in years of peace, and L20,000 in years of war. A third, with nothing to recommend him except his outward graces, bowed and whispered himself into four great employments, from which thirteen to fourteen hundred British guineas flowed month by month into the lap of his Parisian mistress."... "George Selwyn, who returned two members, and had something to say in the election of a third, was at one and the same time Surveyor-General of Crown Lands, which he never surveyed, Registrar in Chancery at Barbadoes, which he never visited, and Surveyor of the Meltings and Clerk of the Irons in the Mint, where he showed himself once a week in order to eat a dinner which he ordered, but for which the nation paid."