PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON A CENTURY'S PROGRESS.

Waikato Times, Volume VIII, Issue 458, 24 April 1875, Page 3

PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON A CENTURY'S PROGRESS.

He constantly found the observations made by English political writers that the French were persons necessarily incompetent to govern themselves because ever since the year 1789 they have been in a state of chronic revolution. But those Englishmen who would recollect that the long Parliament began in 1640, and that the last Stuart rebellion was in 1745 — that was in 105 years — might be inclined to doubt, whether even a much longer period of political vicissitude and political struggle than that which had been passed through by France was the slightest indication that people were not able to govern themselves efficiently. In the early part of the last century they had in fact but just got rid of Bourbons and all they represented. Society was in a state of corruption which could be compared to the second empire of France. Bribery was the means of Government, and peculation was its reward. Four-fifths of the seats in the House of Commons were notoriously for sale in one shfipe or another. The minister required to know the state of the vote market more than any other, and even the King at a later day occupied himself in subsidizing the King's friends, and allotting to them subsidies proportionate to their merits, and services, with a regal rather than a royal sagacity. (Laughter.) The condition of the Church was either torpidity or scandal. (Hear, hear.) The position of dissenters was a scandal to a civilized country. Priestly and the men who believed with him had, if the law were put in force, no civil rights, or at least none that were worth having by any man who valued civil rights. His preaching was a crime, and, every Sunday during which he abstained from going to a service, which he abhorred, he could have been visited by fine and imprisonment. As to the material condition of the country he need not tell them it was a time when no man dare make a journey without being armed, when it took several days to get from here to London, when canals were an invention whose utility was greatly doubted, and whose revolutionary tendencies were strongly suspected. (Laughter). And when they thought that all that was only a hundred years ago !—"! — " Address at Birmingham."