the loyalty of the English working classes.  And meanwhile—­ere that movement shall have spread throughout the length and breadth of the land, and have been applied, as it surely will be some day, not only to distribution, not only to manufacture, but to agriculture likewise—­till then, the best judges of the working men’s worth must be their employers; and especially the employers of the northern manufacturing population.  What their judgment is, is sufficiently notorious.  Those who depend most on the working men, who have the best opportunities of knowing them, trust them most thoroughly.  As long as great manufacturers stand forward as the political sponsors of their own workmen, it behoves those who cannot have had their experience, to consider their opinion as conclusive.  As for that “influence of the higher classes” which is said to be endangered just now; it will exist, just as much as it deserves to exist.  Any man who is superior to the many, whether in talents, education, refinement, wealth, or anything else, will always be able to influence a number of men—­and if he thinks it worth his while, of votes—­by just and lawful means.  And as for unjust and unlawful means, let those who prefer them keep up heart.  The world will go on much as it did before; and be always quite bad enough to allow bribery and corruption, jobbery and nepotism, quackery and arrogance, their full influence over our home and foreign policy.  An extension of the suffrage, however wide, will not bring about the millennium.  It will merely make a large number of Englishmen contented and loyal, instead of discontented and disloyal.  It may make, too, the educated and wealthy classes wiser by awakening a wholesome fear—­perhaps, it may be, by awakening a chivalrous emulation.  It may put the younger men of the present aristocracy upon their mettle, and stir them up to prove that they are not in the same effete condition as was the French noblesse in 1789.  It may lead them to take the warnings which have been addressed to them, for the last thirty years, by their truest friends—­often by kinsmen of their own.  It may lead them to ask themselves why, in a world which is governed by a just God, such great power as is palpably theirs at present is entrusted to them, save that they may do more work, and not less, than other men, under the penalties pronounced against those to whom much is given, and of whom much is required.  It may lead them to discover that they are in a world where it is not safe to sit under the tree, and let the ripe fruit drop into your mouth; where the “competition of species” works with ruthless energy among all ranks of being, from kings upon their thrones to the weeds upon the waste; where “he that is not hammer, is sure to be anvil;” and he who will not work, neither shall he eat.  It may lead them to devote that energy (in which they surpass so far the continental aristocracies) to something better than outdoor amusements or indoor