population as one to two hundred in Limerick, and only as one to twenty-five hundred in Protestant Belfast. The right of local self-government was given to the people of these cities and a few others in 1840; but even this small and tardy justice provoked an English bishop to threaten that it would call down vengeance from God. Full municipal suffrage throughout the island and a domestic Parliament were demanded by all Ireland, under the guidance of the mighty orator O'Connell; but the prejudice against his cause in Great Britain was made invincible by his denouncing "the Saxons," as he called the English, for the crimes of their ancestors. VII. All reforms stopped in 1841, when the Whigs lost the supremacy. It was not their fault that excess in speculation on both sides of the Atlantic had brought on a panic which threw thousands of people out of work in the factory towns, and reduced other thousands to earning only twopence a day. A succession of bad harvests, just before 1841, made wages very low on the farms, and food too dear everywhere. Bread was sold in halfpenny slices; labourers robbed pigs of swill; children fought with dogs for bones in the streets; one person in every eleven was a pauper; and England seemed to Dickens like one vast poorhouse. The old ways of giving charity had been so lavish and indiscriminate as to encourage pauperism; the new system of relief proved really kinder; but at first it was administered too slowly and cautiously for the emergency; and there was some ground for the complaints in _Oliver Twist_. Knowledge that paupers were neglected strengthened the belief of the working-men, that all they needed to make them as well off as their brethren in America was the ballot. Paine, Cobbett, and Hetherington were widely read; manhood suffrage and a secret ballot were called "the People's Charter"; and there were more than a million signatures to the Chartist petition in 1839. These demands were just; but about one Englishman in three was unable to write his name at this time; and many who had acquired this accomplishment knew dangerously little about politics. When we think how much mischief has recently been done in the United States by illiterate and venal votes, we cannot blame Englishmen of the upper and middle classes for delaying to grant universal suffrage. They ought to have made rapid preparation for it, by liberal encouragement of popular education through free schools and a cheap press; but even the Whigs were too indignant at the violence of the Chartists, who made bloody riots in 1841. How ignorant these men were was shown by their doing their worst that year to help carry the elections against the Whigs, who were much less hostile to Chartism than the Conservatives, as those Tories were called who still condescended to politics.