!" Such is their way of construing the matter.

Such, alas, is by no means my way of construing the matter; if it were,
I should have had the happiness of remaining silent, and been without
call to speak here. It is because the contrary of all this is deeply
manifest to me, and appears to be forgotten by multitudes of my
contemporaries, that I have had to undertake addressing a word to them.
The contrary of all this;--and the farther I look into the roots of all
this, the more hateful, ruinous and dismal does the state of mind all
this could have originated in appear to me. To examine this recipe of a
Parliament, how fit it is for governing Nations, nay how fit it may now
be, in these new times, for governing England itself where we are used
to it so long: this, too, is an alarming inquiry, to which all thinking
men, and good citizens of their country, who have an ear for the small
still voices and eternal intimations, across the temporary clamors and
loud blaring proclamations, are now solemnly invited. Invited by the
rigorous fact itself; which will one day, and that perhaps soon, demand
practical decision or redecision of it from us,--with enormous penalty
if we decide it wrong! I think we shall all have to consider this
question, one day; better perhaps now than later, when the leisure
may be less. If a Parliament, with suffrages and universal or any
conceivable kind of suffrages, is the method, then certainly let us set
about discovering the kind of suffrages, and rest no moment till we
have got them. But it is possible a Parliament may not be the method!
Possible the inveterate notions of the English People may have settled
it as the method, and the Everlasting Laws of Nature may have settled it
as not the method! Not the whole method; nor the method at all, if
taken as the whole? If a Parliament with never such suffrages is not the
method settled by this latter authority, then it will urgently behoove
us to become aware of that fact, and to quit such method;--we may depend
upon it, however unanimous we be, every step taken in that direction
will, by the Eternal Law of things, be a step _from_ improvement, not
towards it.

Not towards it, I say, if so! Unanimity of voting,--that will do nothing
for us if so. Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans
of voting. The ship may vote this and that, above decks and below, in
the most harmonious exquisitely constitutional manner: the ship, to get
round Cap