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,