reasonable and humane;[1] the game laws have been made fairly tolerable; the poor-law system has been remodelled with great intelligence, though not very sympathetically; popular education has been introduced; the landlord's protective duty on food has been abolished; trades unionism has been legalised; nonconformity has been freed from its shackles; and Parliament has familiarised itself more and more with the idea of interposing between employer and employed, between landlord and tenant. If it should appear that the complement of these changes—the complete organisation of labour, and State insurance against want—can only be attained under a democratic form of government, then we may, I think, expect a republic to be established everywhere. On the other hand, it seems more than conceivable that wise sovereigns, or wise aristocracies, if they believe these changes to be inevitable, and on the whole good, will determine to guide the popular movement instead of opposing it. Wherever this is done, experience indicates that the working classes will look first to their real - wants, and will acquiesce in any form of government that satisfies these. Therefore it has not appeared necessary for the purposes of this argument to consider whether thrones will be overturned or aristocracies abolished. The chances perhaps are that the world will adopt the republican form of polity more and
- ↑ The recent publication of Sir Robert Peel's early Letters by Mr. Charles Parker shows that in 1828 he was preparing to resign office if George IV. refused to sign the death-warrant of a young man who had been guilty of forgery under circumstances of peculiar temptation (Peel's Letters, p. 317). Indeed, so strong had the old law been, that Blackstone boasts: " There is hardly a case possible to be conceived, wherein forgery … is not made a capital crime."—Commentaries, book iv. chap. xvii. The penalty of death for forgery was, however, abolished in 1832; that is, as soon as the House of Commons was converted to the necessity of reform; and in 1833 one of the first acts of the reformed Parliament was to appoint a Commission for revising the whole Criminal Code.
