The papers read by the working men were not only scurrilous, but they were Republican and revolutionary. The Republic whose example they set before themselves was not the American, which is Conservative, for of this they knew nothing. Let us clearly understand this. Fifty years ago America was far more widely separated from England than is China now. The ideal Republic was then the earlier form of the first French Republic. These people cared little for the massacres which accompanied the application of Republican principles. I do not say that they wished to set the heads of the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting on pikes, but they thought the massacres of innocent women by the French an accident rather than a consequence. They loved the cry of ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,’ and still believed in it. They dreamed of a country which they thought could be established by law, in which every man was to be the equal of his neighbour--as clever, as skilful, as capable, as rich, and as happy. The dream continues, and will always continue, to exist. It is a generous dream--there never has been a nobler dream--so that it is a thousand pities that human greed, selfishness, ambition, and masterfulness will not suffer the dream to be realised. Those who advocated an attempt to realise it flung hard names at the Crown, the Court, the aristocracy, the Church, the educated, and the wealthy. Presently they began to formulate the way by which they thought to place themselves within reach of their object. The way was Chartism. They wanted to carry six measures--Universal Suffrage, Annual Parliaments, Vote by Ballot, Abolition of Property Qualification, Payment of Members, and Equal Electoral Districts. Very well; we have got, practically, four out of the six points, and there are many who think that we are as far off the Millennium as ever. Yet there are, however, still among us people who believe that we can be made happy, just, merciful, and disinterested by changing the machinery. Changing the machinery! The old party of Radicals still work themselves into a white heat by crying for change in the machinery. And now a thing which was never contemplated even by the Chartists themselves--the really important thing--has been acquired by the people. They are no longer the governed, but the governors. The Government is no longer a thing apart from themselves, and outside them. It is their own--it is the Government of the People of England. If there is anything in it which they do not like, they can alter it; if there is anything they agree to abolish, they can abolish it, whether it be Church, Crown, Lords, wealth, education, science, art--anything. They may destroy what they please: they may reduce the English to an illiterate peasantry if they please.