I suppose it is not easy to convey to an American reader a correct idea of the degree of boldness involved in the presentation of this celebrated petition. It really was a very bold thing to do. It was running right in the very teeth of the public opinion of all the classes which are called respectable in England. It was, however, strictly characteristic of the men who signed it. Most, if not all of them, took a prominent part in the prosecution of Governor Eyre of Jamaica, for the lawless execution of George William Gordon and the wholesale and merciless floggings and hangings by which order was made to reign in the island. Most of them, indeed, have a pretty spirit of contradiction of their own, and a pretty gift of sarcasm. I think I hardly remember any man who received, during an equal length of time, a greater amount of abuse from the press than Professor Beesly drew down on himself not very long ago. It was at the time when the public mind was in its wildest thrill of horror at the really fearful revelations of organized murder in connection with the Sawgrinders' Union in Sheffield. The whole question of trades' union organization had been under discussion; and even before the Sheffield revelations came out, the general voice of English respectability was against the workmen's societies altogether. But when the disclosures of organized murder in connection with one union came out, a sort of panic took possession of the public mind. The first, and not unnatural impulse was to assume that all trades' unions must be very much the same sort of thing, and that the societies of workmen were little better than organized Thuggism. Now, Professor Beesly, Mr. Frederick Harrison and other signers of the petition for the Fenians, had long been prominent and influential advocates of the trades' union principle. They had been to the English artisan something like what the Boston Abolitionist was so long to the negro. The trades' union bodies, who felt aggrieved at the unjust suspicion which made them a party to hideous crimes they abhorred, began to hold public meetings to repudiate the charge, and record their detestation of the Sheffield outrages. Professor Beesly attended one of these meetings in London. He made a speech, in which he told the working men that he thought enough had been done in the way of disavowing crimes which no one had a right to impute to them; that there was no need of their further humiliating themselves; and that it was rather odd the English Aristocracy had such a horror of murderers among the poorer classes, seeing how very fond they were of men like Eyre, of Jamaica! In fact, Professor Beesly uplifted his voice very honestly, but rather recklessly and out of time, against the social hypocrisy which is the stain and curse of London society, and which is never so happy as when it can find some chance of denouncing sin or crime among Republicans, or Irishmen, or workingmen.