II. The proof that a reformer was before his age is the fact that later years caught up with him; and this is by no means so true of Owen as of Bentham, who declared Socialism impracticable. He was one of the first to advocate woman suffrage (_Works_, vol. iii., p. 463), savings banks, cheap postage, collection of statistics, direction of punishment towards reformation, and repeal of usury laws. His bulky volumes are in great part occupied with suggestions for making the courts of justice less dilatory and uncertain, less expensive to the poor, and less partial to the rich. His _Principles of Morals and Legislation_ declared, in 1787, that the sole end of a ruler ought to be the happiness of all the people, and that this rule should be the basis of ethics as well as politics. One of his publications in 1817 claimed the suffrage for every man and woman who could read, but insisted that this would be "worse than nothing" without that "shield to freedom," the secret ballot. An opponent who feared that this would destroy private property was answered thus: "Has he ever heard of Pennsylvania?" The complaint that freedom of the press to expose corrupt officials might weaken the government was met by showing that there can be no good government without it. To think our ancestors wiser than us, he says, is to take it for granted that it is not experience but inexperience that is the "mother of wisdom." Bentham's best work was in sowing seed that his friends might reap the harvest. Other authors were generously assisted by his manuscripts, purse, and library; and there has been no stronger advocate of reform than the _Westminster Review_, which he founded in 1824. The first number showed that the Whigs were too much like the Tories. Their leaders were noblemen or millionaires; their favourite measure, abolition of rotten boroughs, was mainly in the interest of the middle class; and their policy towards the masses was a seesaw between promising elevation and permitting oppression. This article was by James Mill, who showed in a later number that any church which was established must, on that account, be bigoted. His essay _On Government_ urges that the masses cannot be protected unless fully represented. They had not yet found out all they needed; but education would teach it; and occasional mistakes would not be so bad as systematic oppression. Among his ablest books is a defence of the rationalism, bequeathed by the eighteenth century, against Transcendentalism, which eclipsed it during the first half of the nineteenth.