abode;) the balance in which the heart or deeds of the deceased are weighed against the symbol of Integrity; the infant Harpocrates,-the emblem of a new life, seated before the judge; the range of assessors who are to pronounce on the life of the being come up to judgment; and finally the judge himself, whose suspended sceptre is to give the sign of acceptance or condemnation. Here the deceased has crossed the living valley and river; and in the caves of the death region, where the howl of the wild dog is heard by night, is this process of judg ment going forward; and none but those who have seen the contrasts of the region with their own eyes,-none who have received the idea through the borrowed imagery of the Greeks, or the traditions of any other people,-can have any adequate notion how the mortuary ideas of the primitive Egyptians, and through them, of the civilised world at large, have been originated by the everlasting conflict of the Nile and the Desert." (To be continned.) LECTURES BY ROBERT OWEN, THE FOUNDER OF ENGLISH SOCIALISM. ON SUNDAYS, Feb. 17th, and March 3rd, Robert Owen will Lecture at the Literary Institution, John-st., Fitzroy Square: Feb. 17th, "On the Necessity of Union among the Leaders of Progress, and how to obtain it." March 3rd, "On Government, and how to Create a Good One." A selection of Choral Music will be performed by the Apollonic Society, before the commencement and at the close of each Lecture. To commence at 7 o'clock precisely. Admission to Hall, 2d; Gallery, 3d. Notice.- Are respectfully informed that with No. 9, (the number for the week ending March 2nd,) CAPTAIN COBLER; THE LINCOLNSHIRE INSURRECTION:" An Historical Romance of the Reign of Henry VIII. By THOMAS COOPER, Author of 'The Purgatory of Suicides.' The succeeding Numbers will be published weekly, at ONE PENNY, until the Romance is complete. Each Number will contain Sixteen Pages. JAMES WATSON, 3, Queen's Head Passage, Paternoster Row. WORKS OF THOMAS COOPER. Already Published, to be had of JAMES WATSON, 3, Queen's Head Passage, Paternoster Row. THE PURGATORY OF SUICIDES. A Prison Rhyme. In 10 Books.. (To be had also in 18 numbers, at 2d cach; or in 6 parts at 6d.) WISE SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES. s. d. 3 6 A series of Tales illustrative of Lincolnshire and 5 0 1 6 0 6 1 0 06 Two Orations against taking away Human Life under any circumstances,. Eight Letters to the Young Men of the Working Classes. (Collected from the Plain Speaker,') Penny Publications for the Leading Thoroughfares, To be had of J. Watson, 3, Queen's Head Passage, In Christ and all Good Names. Which Church will ultimately contain the Universal Religion of Human Nature. Paternoster Row. 1850, ITS WOMEN, MEN, AND MANNERS. THE FOUR Ps. Princes, Peers, Priests, People. London: Printed by SHIRREFS AND RUSSELL, 190, High Holborn; and Published by JAMES WATSON, 3,Queen's Head Passage, Paternoster Row. OR, UNFETTERED THINKER AND PLAIN SPEAKER FOR TRUTH, FREEDOM, AND PROGRESS. "AND though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple! Who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?"-Milton's Areopagitica. No. S.-Vol. I.] FOR THE WEEK ENDING SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1850. [Price One Penny. SIGNS OF PROGRESS. "The feudal serf-though still a clown, Doth read; and, where his sires gave homage, pays-a frown!" "The sinewy artisan, the weaver lean, The shrunken stockinger, the miner swarth, Read, think, and feel; and in their eyes the sheen Purgatory of Suicides. Yet we are WITH all their misery and degradation, the young intelligence of the People is a century in advance of their's who pretend to govern. Let those who doubt this look into the Working-men's Journals, which are springing up in the land, and mark the far-advanced ideas so ardently expressed, and the thoughts that are stirring in poor men's hearts, poured forth with a fearless utterance. It is the People's thoughts: and as all institutions are preceded by, and based on thoughts, so shall the People's institutions, social, political, and religious, follow the People's thinking. In fact, no revolution can be wrought out that is not first thought out. Well, we are thinking; and a revolution is going on in England now, more effectual than any yet witnessed on the continent. True, we are not pulling down thrones, crowns, prisons, and bastiles, by force of arms. destroying piece-meal the ground on which they are built: so that when they fall, they fall for ever; and this is better than to demolish them, and yet leave our enemies the place and power wherewith to build others. See, too, the many movements which, day by day, are springing into existence for the redemption of struggling Humanity: movements which our forefathers deemed Utopian. Ah, blessings on the Utopians! the practicalities of To-day were chimeras pitting about the Utopian of Yesterday; and the Utopian of To-day shall become the Realities of To-morrow! All the world's grandest ideas have been denounced as mad, and their enunciators have been branded Utopian! Hold on, my struggling, suffering brothers, worn heart-bare by toil and travail, in the competitive strife; crushed as you are by machinery and capital, you shall yet conquer, and wield them to your own purposes, instead of fitting iron shafts and never-tiring wheels against heart-strings and sinews, and compelling tender infancy to earn its own dear bread by the eternal cheapening of flesh and blood! I see a light in your eyes which is the light of Knowledge; and that knowledge shall enable you to play a noble part in the redemption of the time, and the emancipation of the down-trodden of the earth. On every hand I read some sign of Progress. "I watch the circle of th' eternal years, And read for ever in the storied page In the long scroll of blood, and wrong, and tears, Men slay the prophets: faggot, rack, and cross, And sov'reign Freedom wins the world at last." Thirty years ago and the pillory stood by the walls of old Newgate. In its grip was Daniel Isaac Eaton, an old patriarch of patriotism, and warrior for freedom of Thought. His enemies had thrust him there, to nail him on the cross of public hatred. The mob were gathered to pelt and insult the good old man ; and there he stood looking on them, so dauntless yet so forgiving-worn, scarred and grey, yet so mildly Christ-like, that the mob could not persecute: a strange feeling of sympathy was stirring in their hearts; and, at last, a cheer burst from them-and such a cheer that shook universal Tyranny! Hear it priests! hear it tyrants! the canaille cheer your victim; and ring the death-knell of another instrument of torture-for it is the last day of the Pillory on Newgate hill. And thus, as enlightenment spreads among the masses, shall we have the down-cheer of torture and tyranny of all kinds bursting from them. For it is in the dense ignorance which covers the people like a sea of darkness, that Tyranny lets drop its anchors. Remove this, and its mainstay is gone; and the King-craft, the Priest-craft, and the State-craft shall be swept away by the rushing waves of Progress. Time was when we simple "clowns" could not conceive how a man might have a sounding title, and not be a great man. Hence you would see our villagers bowing and cringing when the "Lord," or the " Squire," or other parish-anointed notability was passing. Poor things! they did not see that the lordling and the squire were but paupers preying on their flesh and earnings. They did not calculate how these wrung the life out of their hearts, day by day, to add to their own superfluities. Poor things! the poet's quatrain-how truly it described their blindness: But this degrading servility is fast wearing away. We have been wont to look on a "lord" hooded in the gloom of our ignorance: now, we see him in the light of Knowledge, and, lo! he has not even a crown on his head, like the common cock that lord's it on the dunghill; ergo, we ken not why he should be cock of the world's walk any longer. In fact, we see that there is no difference between the heads of lords and our own, save that their brains preponderate at the back of the head, whilst ours lie nearer to our eyes. We begin to love the nobles of Nature who wear the stamp of the gods on their brows; and to loathe these miserable imposter-lords, who have so long passed current in the world for nobleness they did not possess. We begin to value a man for the good he does, and not for the large pension of which he plunders society; for the numbers of his fellows he saves from suffering, and not for the number of throats he cuts. I say these are signs of Progress. Then be not dismayed, my brothers! Though we do not conquer in a day, have patience and still struggle on, for in struggling shall we win the iron thews that serve to throw the world! It needs a high heart and never-tiring faith to bear up; but, let not your hearts die within you, ye who toil on thro' nights of suffering and days of pain, watering the bread of penury with the tears of misery. Remember that sacrifice and suffering are the natural inheritance of the soldiers of Liberty; but "Nil desperandum" cried Leonidas, and Greece was saved at Thermopyla!" Nil desperandum" pleaded Columbus to his mutinous crew, and in three days the new World was found!" Nil desperandum" shouted immortal Kossuth, unsheathing his sword, and like a giant roused from wine, the gallant Hungarian nation rolled back the tide of war from the shores of their loved Fatherland, with a crash that shattered the Austrian Empire to its rotten core! "Nil desperandum" cried the heroic Mazzini to the men of Rome, and crushed and down-trodden as they were, Earth felt the tread of the Roman once more! "Nil desperandum" cry we, my Brothers, and yet we'll revolutionize the tides and currents of old England's heart, and make her a land worth living in and worth dying for! Many more martyrs will yet die in the People's cause; many will fall by the way; many more tears will fall to the earth; many more groans will ascend to Heaven; yet will our day of triumph come. Even now, the despots of the earth and oppressors of the nations, like swine swimming, are cutting their own throats by hastening the day of bloody assize. Tyranny may as well essay to stop the planets in their orbits, as to stay a People ripe for freedom from accomplishing their destiny. "Go back!" They may ape Canute of old, and cry to the mighty waves, and sweep to destruction but the waters will ascend higher still and higher, "Let there be the boasted bulwarks of despotism. For even as God said, light!" and there was light; so let the people say, "Let there be Freedom!" GERALD MASSEY. and there shall be Freedom. AN ARGUMENT FOR UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE. THE right of every man to a voice in making the laws to which, in a state of society, he is bound to subject himself, might be satisfactorily established by some such an argument as follows :-Let it be admitted as a truth-let it be laid down as an axiom, for assuredly no one will be found to deny it, be his religious creed what it may—that all forms of government must have either a divine or a human origin. In other words, every system of law is either the emanation of Divine intelligence, having its birth from, and owing its maintenance to a power independent of any secondary or created being; or, else it is the result of human contrivance, and the offspring of human thought. The Power, commonly called God, which governs the entire system of nature-the terrestrial and celestial systems of the universe-may legitimately be termed divine, for whether it acts by partial or by general laws, it is certainly antecedent to humanity, and above its comprehension. It is superhuman and therefore divine. To the laws emanating from this Intelligence, this Divinity, man himself is compelled to submit. Born their subject, in his allegiance to them must he die. There is, in this sense, such a thing as divine government; nature bears witness to the fact; and is there not also such a thing as human government Certainly. We acknowledge this fact in the various Monarchies, Oligarchies, and Republics, of ancient and modern times. They depend for their existence on the will of man; by that will are they regulated, preserved, or destroyed; there are social worlds governed by man, as absolutely Every national as all physical worlds are by what is termed God, or nature. government, then, being a system of law, must have either a divine or a human origin; that is, it must be either the growth of Heaven or earth; it either comes down to man from a superior and irresponsible Power, and is imposed upon him whether he approve or not, or it flows from man as the result of inherent tendencies in his constitution, having its germ planted deep in his intellectual and moral being. If, therefore, all political institutions and governments are established either by the authority of man, or the will of God, and if the latter be the correct view, why then the extreme old Tory doctrine of the Right divine' of Kings may possibly be true, and wherever that divine-right institution is found, with it no mortal is justified in interfering. It rules him as arbitrarily as any fixed law of nature, and he must obey its decrees, or suffer the penalties consequent on disobedience. This dogma is, however, exploded, and except in certain polite circles where loyal old maids sigh over the degeneracy of the age, is scouted as a transcendent absurdity. On the other hand, if all political institutions originate in the will of man-if it be true that the people are the only legitimate source of political power is it not true that every political constitution, every national government not founded on a broad popular basis is an illegitimate constitution-a spurious, unjust, tyrannical government? An escape from the affirmative is impossible. And as a corollary to this it may be asserted that as man, or the people, can alone frame a rightful national government, so man, or the people, must have the right to overturn a wrongful national govern ment. We now come to the question Who are the people? The answer to which is, by the people of a country, we mean the population of a country, neither more or less. "What !" exclaims the aristocrat, "do you universal suffragists intend every man, woman, and child, irrespective of age, education, or character, to vote for members of parliament ?" Not so fast, good sir, if you please; there is no rule without an exception, and exceptions are commonly said to prove the rule. We the advocates of universal, or manhood suffrage, are not so mad as many imagine; we seek nothing that carries the stamp of folly on its face; nothing which is out of nature; nothing unreasonable or involving a contradiction. What we contend for is the principle that laws which concern all should be enacted only after all have had an opportunity, directly or indirectly, of assenting to them. But no one is idiot enough to suppose that the "muling and puking" infant is to have a vote, even under the much-ridiculed idea of universal suffrage, though it is often argued that if you exclude the baby in the arms, on account of his early years from the franchise, you are equally justified in excluding men on the ground of their poverty-a most impotent, and impudent conclusion. All parties agree that a line must be drawn somewhere with respect to the exercise of that important right, but it does not follow, there is not a just as well as an unjust method of drawing that line. A majority of any society may have the power of imposing a particular restriction upon the minority, but that restriction may nevertheless be unjust. Because, then, society has a right to draw the said line somewhere, we cannot admit that society has an equal right to draw it anywhere. In order to give an opinion on any matter, opinion must exist; in order to give it freely, independence must be, at least, presumed, neither of which conditions can be fulfilled in babyhood. Both may be presumed, without difficulty when manhood is attained. Nature points out the direction in which we are to look where the restriction line is to be justly drawn. Nature tells us we are to have regard to age, and age alone in the first instance, and in the next to mental sanity. Nature shows us no connection between property and intelligence, between a full purse and a full head. Increase of wealth never brings with it increased intellectuality; the growth of time often does--whether the epoch of manhood shall be fixed at twenty one, twenty, or any other period is for society to determine. But whatever year is determined on, let it be applicable to all, rich and poor-equality, and justice the very soul of equality, will then be respected. No hardship will be felt when the line' is thus drawn in accordancy with the dictates of nature. If the caprice |