be a failure; but it failed, not because of the political principles
on which it was founded, but because those principles had in the
meantime been acknowledged and applied. At least three of the six
articles of the Chartist charter were soon adopted by Parliament. The
principle of Manhood Suffrage is virtually a part of the English
Constitution. The right of voting by Secret Ballot, deposited in a
ballot-box, has also been acknowledged as a part of the _modus
operandi_ of all British elections. In like manner the Property
Qualification formerly imposed on candidates for Parliament, against
which the Chartists so vehemently and justly declaimed, has long since
been abolished.


THE ABOLITION OF HUMAN BONDAGE.

Certainly no greater deed of philanthropy has been accomplished by
mankind than the extinction of human servitude. True, that horrible
relic of antiquity has not yet been wholly obliterated from the world,
but the nineteenth century has dealt upon it such staggering and fatal
blows as have driven it from all the high places of civilization and
made it crouch in obscure corners and unenlightened regions on the
outskirts of paganism. Slavery has not indeed been extinguished; but
it is scotched, and must expire. According to the tendency of things,
the sun in his course at the middle of the twentieth century will
hardly light the hovel of a single slave!

The opening of the modern era found slavery universally distributed.
There was perhaps at the middle of the eighteenth century not a
single non-slave-holding race or nation on the globe! All were alike
brutalized by the influences and traditions of the ancient system. All