gully-drains, and detestable abominations; and omnipotent London
cannot sweep the dirt out of itself. British Liberty
produces--what? Floods of Hansard Debates every year, and
apparently little else at present. 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