. If these are the results of British Liberty, I,
for one, move we should lay it on the shelf a little, and look out for
something other and farther. We have achieved British Liberty hundreds
of years ago; and are fast growing, on the strength of it, one of the
most absurd populations the Sun, among his great Museum of Absurdities,
looks down upon at present."

Curious enough: the model of the world just now is England and her
Constitution; all Nations striving towards it: poor France swimming
these last sixty years in seas of horrid dissolution and confusion,
resolute to attain this blessedness of free voting, or to die in chase
of it. Prussia too, solid Germany itself, has all broken out into
crackling of musketry, loud pamphleteering and Frankfort parliamenting
and palavering; Germany too will scale the sacred mountains, how steep
soever, and, by talisman of ballot-box, inhabit a political Elysium
henceforth. All the Nations have that one hope. Very notable, and
rather sad to the humane on-looker. For it is sadly conjectured, all the
Nations labor somewhat under a mistake as to England, and the causes of
her freedom and her prosperous cotton-spinning; and have much misread
the nature of her Parliament, and the effect of ballot-boxes and
universal suffrages there.

What if it were because the English Parliament was from the first,
and is only just now ceasing to be, a Council of actual Rulers, real
Governing Persons (called Peers, Mitred Abbots, Lords, Knights of the
Shire, or howsoever called), actually _ruling_ each his section of
the country,--and possessing (it must be said) in the lump, or when
assembled as a Council, uncommon patience, devoutness, probity,
discretion and good fortune,--that the said Parliament ever came to be
good for much? In that case it will not be easy to "imitate" the English
Parliament; and the ballot-box and suffrage will be the mere bow of
Robin Hood, which it is given to very few to bend, or shoot with to
any perfection. And if the Peers become mere big Capitalists, Railway
Directors, gigantic Hucksters, Kings of Scrip, _without_ lordly quality,
or other virtue except cash; and the Mitred Abbots change to mere
Able-Editors, masters of Parliamentary Eloquence, Doctors of
Political Economy, and such like; and all _have_ to be elected by a
universal-suffrage ballot-box,--I do not see how the English Parliament
itself will long continue sea-worthy! Nay, I find England in her own
big dum