Carlile’s writings abound in instances of great political penetration: thus he placed on the title page of the second volume of the _Republican_ these words—‘Liberty is the property of man: a Republic only can protect it.’ The same volume contained his qualification ot equality. ‘Equality,’ says he, ‘means not an equality of riches, but of rights merely.’(1) Yet the contrary is asserted to this hour. ‘Timidity,’ wrote he in 1828, ‘maybe seen sitting on the countenance of almost every Politician. He speaks and speculates with a trembling which generates a prejudice in others. As it is the slave who makes the tyrant, so it is timidity in the Politician which creates the prejudice of the persecutor.’(2) In words to this effect, he pourtrayed that conventional caution of the newspaper press, which is to this hour the bane of popular progress. He had a distincter conception of the part to be played by education in public reform, than any other agitator of his rank at that time. ‘I have before advised your majesty,’ said he, in dedicating vol. 12 of the _Republican_ to George IV., ‘to patronise Mechanics’ Institutions, and you will become a greater monarch than Buonaparte. Kings must come to this, and he will be the wisest who does it first and voluntarily.’ Republicanism was not with Carlile, as with so many—politics in rags; he never divested it of efficiency and dignity. To one who said that his exacting £100 shares for his Book Company was aristocratic, he answered, ‘Call it what you please, that is republican which is done well.’(3) Carlile took a view of the rationale and initiation of revolution in England as manly as it was sagacious. ‘In the beginning of my political career,’ he writes, ‘I had those common notions which the enthusiasm of youth and inexperience produces, that all reforms must be the work of physical force. The heat of my imagination shewed me everything about to be done at once. I am now enthusiastic, but it is in _working_ where I can work _practically_ rather than theoretically; and though I would be the last to oppose a well-applied physical force, in the bringing about reforms or revolutions, I would be the last in advising others to rush into useless dangers that _I would shun, or where I would not lead_. I have long formed the idea that an insurrection against grievances in this country must, to be successful, be spontaneous and not plotted, and that all political conspiracies may be local and even individual evils. I challenge the omniscience of the Home Office to say whether I ever countenanced anything of the kind in word or deed. I will do nothing in a political point of view which cannot be done openly.’(4) There is a strong vein of political wisdom in all this, not yet appreciated by popular politicians, and this has the merit of having been written at a time, when (as indeed now) the maxim of English popular progressive politics is not to find how much can be done _within the law_, but how