despair into a premature grave; and when this has been confirmed by the evidence of their care-worn looks, their excited feelings, and their desolate homes—can I wonder that many of them, in such times of misery and destitution, spoke and acted with ferocious precipitation! "An idea was now springing up among the operatives, that originated with the Chartists, but which came at last to be cherished as a darling child by many and many a one. They could not believe that government knew of their misery; they rather chose to think it possible that men could voluntarily assume the office of legislators for a nation, ignorant of its real state; as who should make domestic rules for the pretty behaviour of children, without caring to know that these children had been kept for days without food. Besides, the starving multitudes had heard that the very existence of their distress had been denied in Parliament; and though they felt this strange and inexplicable, yet the idea that their misery had still to be revealed in all its depths, and that then some remedy would be found, soothed their aching hearts, and kept down their rising fury. "So a petition was framed, and signed by thousands in the bright spring days of 1839, imploring Parliament to hear witnesses who could testify to the unparalleled destitution of the manufacturing districts. Nottingham, Sheffield, Glasgow, Manchester, and many other towns, were busy appointing delegates to convey this petition, who might speak, not merely of what they had seen and had heard, but from what they had borne and suffered. Life-worn, gaunt, anxious, hunger-stamped men were those delegates." The delegates went in a body to London, and applied at the Parliament House for permission to present their petition upon the subject nearest their hearts—the question of life and death. They were haughtily denied a hearing. The assemblage of the "best gentlemen in Europe," were, perhaps, discussing the best means of beautifying their parks and extending their estates. What had these rose-pink legislators to do with the miseries of the base-born rabble—the soil-serfs of their chivalric Norman ancestors? The delegates returned in despair to their homes, to meet their starving relatives and friends, and tell them there was not a ray of hope. In France such a rejection of a humble petition from breadless working-men would have been followed by a revolution. In Great Britain the labourers seem to have the inborn submission of hereditary slaves. Though they feel the iron heel of the aristocracy upon their necks, and see their families starving around them, they delay, and still delay, taking that highway to freedom—manly and united rebellion.