8
would then listen more attentively to Mr. Seeley's remonstrances on dockyard waste.
This advocacy of a refusal to pay taxes may seem to you the advocacy of a measure violent and extreme; believe me, it is no more violent, no more extreme, than your refusal to permit the tax-payers to share in the election of those whose decision determines the amount and nature of the taxation. M. de Lafayette once said that "tranquillity under the yoke of despotism is servile cowardice, and resistance the most sacred of all duties." You may reply, or think without replying, that the proposal to resist the collection of the imperial taxes is only an empty threat, but I entreat you not so to regard it. You in your debates have taunted the people, and although they remain calm under the insult, they have not forgotten your mocking words; they waited, and no good came from their patience; they trusted, and you have betrayed their trust; they hoped, and you mocked their hopefulness; they were quiet, and you taunted them with apathy: and now to-day they are tired of waiting, they have in you neither trust nor confidence, they have met in their thousands—counties, cities, boroughs, and villages, all have spoken or are speaking, and their words are growing sterner and stronger. Public opinion manifests itself slowly, but woe to those who resist its almost universal expression. The people will have reform, and it must be no sham, no juggler's trick, pleasant in word and hollow in practice. The people will have no more wretched talk of checks and counter-balancings; they will have a real, wide, bona fide measure of reform. They ask a vote for honest, resident, industrious manhood, and if you dally longer, if you trifle much further with their appeal you will be greeted with the terrible news that in obstinately and wickedly preventing reform you have been madly provoking revolution.
PRICE ONE PENNY.
London: Published at the Office of the National Reformer,
17, Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, E.C.
