pound rental in the burghs are equally vested in the franchise with their proprietors, it is merely the proprietors of such houses that are vested in the franchise in the counties. Why not extend the privilege to the tenants also? The writer of this article inhabits a house a few hundred yards beyond the boundary line of the city, as drawn at the time of the Reform Bill, for which he pays a rent of rather more than thirty pounds yearly; and there are some of his neighbours, most respectable, intelligent men, who inhabit houses for which they pay rents of forty and forty-five pounds; but, falling short of a fifty-pound rental, they do not possess a county vote. Why, we ask, should this state of things exist? As the tenants of thirty and forty pound houses, they belong to an entirely different class of persons from the tenants of thirty and forty pound farms; and the fact of actual resi dency in their dwellings places them in a category still more widely different from that to which the fictitious voters of our counties belong. We are disposed to hold that the exclusion of this class from the franchise is simply the consequence of a design to prevent the introduction, not of an element of subserviency, but of an element of independence, into our county elections, and that in this direction the franchise might be safely extended. It is a direction, however, in which extension could not very considerably affect the representative basis. With regard to further extension along the tenant line, our views are far from clear. It seems obvious, however, that a scale of rental common in its pecuniary amount to our cities and our smaller towns does not adequately represent classes. The ten-pound house-renters of the lesser towns are considerably superior, in the average, to the ten-pound house-renters of the larger; nay, it seems doubtful whether the five or six pound tenants of burghs containing from fifteen hundred to three thousand inhabitants do not stand, on the average, on as high a level as the

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ten-pound tenants of the towns that possess a population of from eighty to a hundred thousand. The extension of the franchise to the five-pound householders of Edinburgh and Glasgow would in all probability wholly swamp the existing constituencies of these towns, and give them for their representatives mere loquacious Chartists, full of words, but infirm of judgment and devoid of principle; but we would have no such fear regarding a similar extension in burghs such as Tain and Dingwall, Cromarty and Nairn.

Our dread of universal, or even mere househoid suffrage, is derived chiefly from our long and intimate acquaintance with the classes into whose hands it would throw the political power of the country. "A poor man that oppresseth the poor," says Solomon, "is like a sweeping rain which leaveth no food." Alas! tyranny, as the wise man well knew, is not the exclusive characteristic of the wealthy and the powerful, nor is oppression the offence of a mere class. It is not the aristocracy, and they only, that are cruel and unjust the poor can also override the natural liberties of the poor, and trample upon their rights; and it is according to our experience that there is more of this injustice and tyranny among that movement class now known as Chartists, but which we have closely studied under other names, when coming in contact with them in strikes, combinations, and political meetings, than in perhaps any other class in the country. It has been at least our own fate in life never personally to experience the oppression of the higher ranks, but not a little of the tyranny of the lower classes, especially that of this movement class. And we derive much of our

confidence in the property qualification, not merely from the sort of ballast in the State which it furnishes, but from the fact that we never yet saw a workman who made a right use of his wages with an eye to his advancement in life, or who was in any respect a rising man, at all disposed to join

in oppressing a comrade or neighbour. We have very frequently seen him made a victim of a tyrannical combination, -unmanly odds taken against him if at all formidable for native power, but rarely, if ever, enacting the part of a tyrant himself. In a little work recently published, entitled the "Autobiography of a Working Man," we find an experience of this kind so truthfully rendered, that we cannot resist submitting it to the reader. The working man's story is illustrative of a class of cases incalculably numerous, from the existence of which, too often and surely tested, we derive our chief dread of universal, or even household suffrage, and the abandonment of a property qualification. It was in the year 1830, when the cry for political reform in this country was so loud and general, that the following incident in the history of the working man took place :

"A number of masons were hewing the blocks of stone, and each hewer had a labourer allotted to him to do the rougher work upon the stone with a short pick,-technically, to 'scutch' it. The masons were intolerable tyrants to their labourers. I was in the quarry cutting the blocks from the rock when the tide was out; and when the tide was in, I went and scutched with some of the hewers,-chiefly with my friend Alick. One day, when we had been reading in the newspapers a great deal about the tyranny of the Tories, and the tyranny of the aristocracy in general, and some of the hewers had been, as usual, wordy and loud in denouncing all tyrants, and exclaiming, 'Down with them for ever!' one of them took up a long wooden straight-edge, and struck a labourer with the sharp edge of it over the shoulders. Throwing down my pick, I turned round and told him that, so long as I was about the works, I would not see a labourer struck in that manner, without questioning the masons' pretended right to domineer over labourers. 'You exclaim against tyranny,' I continued, and you yourselves are tyrants, if any. body is.' The hewer answered that I had no business to interfere; that he had not struck me. No,' said I, or you would have been in the sea by this time. But I have seen labourers who dared not speak for themselves knocked about by you, and by many others; and by every mason about these works I have seen labourers ordered to do things, and compelled to do them, which no working man should order another to do, far less have the power to compel him to do. And I tell you it

shall not be done.'

"The labourers gathered around me; the masons conferred together. One of them said, speaking for the rest, that he must put a stop to this: the privileges of masons were not to be questioned by labourers ; and I must either submit to that reproof or punishment which they thought fit to inflict, or leave the works; if not, they must all leave the works. The punishment hinted at was, to submit to be held over one of the blocks of stone face downward, the feet held down on one side, the head and arms held down on the other side, while the mason apprentices would whack the offender with their leathern aprons knotted hard. I said that, so far from submitting to reproof or punishment, I would carry my opposition a great deal farther than I had done. They had all talked about parliamentary reform; we had all joined in the cry for reform, and denounced the exclusive privileges of the anti-reformers; but I would begin reform where we then stood. I would demand, and I then demanded, that if a hewer wanted his stone turned over, and called labourers together to do it, they should not put hands to it unless he assisted; that if a hewer struck a labourer at his work, none of the labourers should do anything thereafter, of any nature whatever, for that hewer. The masons laughed. 'And farther,' said I, the masons shall not be entitled to the choice of any room they choose, if we go into a public-house to be paid, to the exclusion of the labourers; nor, if there be only one room in the house, shall the labourers be sent outside the door, to give the room to the masons, as has been the case. In everything we shall be your equals, except in wages; that we have no right to expect.' The masons, on hearing these conditions, set up a shout of derisive laughter. It was against the laws of their body to hear their privileges discussed by a labourer; they could not suffer it, they said, and I must instantly submit to punishment for my contumacy. I told them that I was a quarryman, and not a mason's labourer; that, as such, they had no power over me. They scouted this plea, and said that wherever masons were at work they were superior, and their privileges were not to be questioned. I asked if the act of a mason striking a labourer with a rule was not to be questioned. They said, by their own body it might, upon a complaint from the labourer; but in this case the labourer was insolent to the mason, and the latter had a right to strike him. They demanded that I should at once cease to argue the question, and submit, before it was too late, to whatever punishment they chose to inflict. Upon hearing this, I put myself in a defensive attitude, and said, 'Let me see who shall first lay hands on me?' No one approaching, I continued, "We have been reading in the newspaper discussions about reform, and have been told how much is to be gained by even one person sometimes making a resolute stand against oppressive power. We have only this day seen in the papers a warning to the

aristocracy and the anti-reformers that another John Hampden may arise. Come on, he who dares! I shall be Hampden to the tyrannies of masons!'

"None of them offered to lay hands on me; one said they had better let the affair rest where it was, as there would only be a fight about it, and several others assented; and so we resumed our work.

"Had it been in summer, when building was going on, they would have either dismissed me from the works, or have struck, and refused to work themselves. It was only about the end of January, and they could not afford to do more than threaten me."-June 7, 1848.

A FIVE-POUND QUALIFICATION.

WHEN, owing to some deep-seated cause, the general level of a country is heightened by sudden upheaval, not only is its area extended by an apparent recession of the sea, but the outlines of its coasts are also very much changed. In places where the land is flat and low, and the water shallow, it receives accessions of great tracts of new country; whereas in other places, where high table-lands sink suddenly into the sea, and the water is deep, it is restricted to nearly its old limits. In Scotland, for instance, that last upheaval which laid dry the old-coast-line added many a rich acre to the links of the Forth and the Carse of Gowrie, and gave to the country the sites of most of its seaport towns, such as Leith and Greenock, Musselburgh, Stonehaven, and Inverness; whereas, along the rocky shores of Aberdeen and Banff, and in espe cial Caithness and Orkney, it did little more, save here and there in a narrow inlet, than reduce by some two or three fathoms the depth of sea at the foot of the cliffs. It left the old boundaries just what they had been. The extension of area which took place in consequence of the upheaval was