see, side by side, teetotal Crossley and Bass famed for bitter beer. Oxford sends there its trained and scholarly churchmanship, and the manufacturing towns their vigorous dissent. Lowness of birth is no obstacle to success. Lindsay was a cabin-boy; Fox, a weaver in Norwich in his youth; poor Brotherton, a factory lad; Ingram cleaned the shoes of one of his constituents; yet the House gives these men as ready a hearing as it awards to the inheritors of broad domains and the most illustrious of historic names. If the House is flunkeyfied, conventional, and illogical, it is the fault of the public—more flunkeyfied, conventional, and illogical—whom it represents. Waste not your honest indignation, but reserve it for the proper parties out of doors. Nor grumble that the working men have had no representative since their order was represented by the idiotic and self-seeking Feargus O’Connor, when you remember that, by means of the freehold land societies, almost any working men who like to go without beer might in a very short time acquire votes, and, combined, might carry the counties. Aristocrats, you say, are in the People’s House. Yes, but they are men, most of them, of untainted honour—of lofty aim—of comprehensive views; and the general fusion and ventilation of opinion and clash of intellect elicit action most congenial with the intelligence of the age. Take any of the extreme men, for instance. What can they do? Are they the representatives of the mass of opinion? Is the country prepared to break up the National Church, as Mr. Miall would recommend—to dissolve the Union, as Gavan Duffy desired—to put down all our armaments, as Mr. Bright would think proper—to grant the five points of the Charter, as poor Feargus O’Connor contended? Most certainly not. Yet the representatives of such opinions are in the House, and rightly in the House. With them away, the opinions of the people would not be fairly represented. At the same time, it must be remembered, that such men represent but sections, and it is wisely arranged that the representatives of all sections shall meet. Thus justice is done to all. Thus mutual toleration is learned. Thus the mental vision of all becomes enlarged. We make these remarks because we think we see a tendency to run down the House of Commons, and the representative institutions of which it is the type. By Britons this feeling should not be entertained. That assembly contains, it is true, not the grandest, but the best practical intellects of which our country can boast. In its earliest days it rocked the cradle of our liberties, and still it guards them, though the stripling has long become a giant. At our elections there is deep-seated demoralisation, but still that demoralisation has its bounds which it cannot pass, and the high-minded and the honourable form the majority in the House of Commons. At any rate, the representative body is quite as virtuous and intelligent as the constituency.