You are unjust to the workman; and
more, you are unjust to your own class. For thirty years past, gentlemen
and ladies of all shades of opinion have been labouring for and among the
working classes, as no aristocracy on earth ever laboured before; and do
you suppose that all that labour has been in vain? That it has bred in the
working classes no increased reverence for law, no increased content with
existing institutions, no increased confidence in the classes socially
above them? If so, you must have as poor an opinion of the capabilities of
the upper classes, as you have of those of the lower.
So far from the misdoings of Trades' Unions being an argument against the
extension of the suffrage, they are, in my opinion, an argument for it. I
know that I am in a minority just now. I know that the common whisper is
now, not especially of those who look for a Conservative reaction, that
these Trades' Unions must be put down by strong measures: and I confess
that I hear such language with terror. Punish, by all means, most severely,
all individual offences against individual freedom, or personal safety;
but do not interfere, surely, with the Trades' Unions themselves.
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