wretched superstition which pervades even this book, and to separate its good from its bad principles.

To pass over the heavens, the luminous cross, the divine workmanship, and all such fine things, or nothings, I would observe, that Constantine did not conquer the ignorant of antiquity! He was himself the most ignorant among the ignorant! The most superstitious among the superstitious! The most hypocritical among the hypocritical! The most base among the base! The greatest villain among villains! The most treacherous among the treacherous! The most false among the false! A more odious character than Constantine history has not painted! And shall this worst of despots! this murderer in cold blood of his defenceless, nearest, protection-promised relatives! this fop who dressed himself in curled hair of all colours at the same time, and all sorts of fantastic dresses, to distinguish himself from, and to amuse, his subjects! this Pagan high priest! this first of Christian Kings! shall he be made an emblem of conquering truth and liberty? No! never! beyond the Major's regiment of Radical Christian Political Reformers!

Constantine was a Christian among Christians, and a Pagan among Pagans! He would alternately officiate in councils and in churches as the chief of the Christian quarrelling and fighting bishops, and offer sacrifice to the Pagan Gods, in the Pagan temples, upon the Pagan altars, in a Pagan manner, as the Sovereign Pontiff, the Pagan high priest! After Christianity had been three hundred years stalking among the dregs and slaves of the Pagan people of Rome and her Provinces, and Constantine became an aspirant to the Imperial Purple, he, found the Christians and Pagans as equal in numbers and strength as they were in. ignorance! No former Emperor, or imperial aspirant, had given the Christians the least countenance, in opposition to the established religion, or the worship of the immortal Gods, which, without sectarianism, had been the uniform worship of the Roman people, from their first forming a people, a city, and a government. Constantine had two competitors in Licinius and Maxentius; and to strengthen his purposes, to overthrow them, and get the diadem to himself, whilst he professed sincere attachment to the Pagans and all their long established institutions; he offered to the Christians to become a Christian and support them, if they would rally under his standard, or under the standard of the Cross in his support! But for this incident, it is a question, if ever the Christian religion had become the established religion of any

country, after struggling in contempt and obscurity for three centuries! The offer gave new life to the Christians: they rallied in immense numbers under the banner of the Cross, in support of Constantine, which completely gave him the advantage over his competitors, and fixed him securely on the imperial throne! The Christians were then publicly recognized and supported; and like the Mosques and Christian churches now in the Mahometan countries, the Pagan temples and Christian churches in Rome and her Provinces, long vied with each other, and produced a mutual hatred among the people, until the latter triumphed and rooted out the former; which is, and must be, the common case with all religions, all sects and all churches; so long as any two exist as a source of superstition and sectarian hatred! Such then was the Constantine, whom the Major holds up as the prototype of rising truth and liberty!

In the preface of the book, I find nothing to arrest my attention here, though I may possibly refer to it by and by. The body of the work is in the form of a dialogue between A, B, and C. The latter is the Major himself speaking; the two former the Major writing! A, is an aristocrat of whom the Major makes a democrat; and the subject is of course a fiction! Nothing will change aristocrats to democrats until democracy, becomes the ruling power. It matters not who or what is in power, the aristocrats are ever as servile and base in disposition, as haughty in outward show and temper; and are always as ready to truckle on the one side as to insult on the other!

Kings and aristocrats are made out of mankind; you can make them of no other stuff: the one is the spoiled child of the national family; the others are that child's playthings, or the more immediate creatures of its humours, and both exhibit nothing more than a specimen of human nature corrupted by bad education! When mankind shall educate their legislators and magistrates in a better manner, they may expect better laws and better government, but until they are wise enough and strong enough to do this, they must be content to suffer what they do suffer! Iustead of legislators educating the people, the latter must educate the former, and then all will soon be right!

B, is a personage rightly placed between A, the new made aristocratical democrat, and C, the long standing democratical aristocrat, and plays the part of a go-between, praising alternately, whatever each of the others say, and occasionally so bold as to ask questions! B, is also a poli

tical lawyer, a sort of Whig lawyer without a silk gown, an essential character to a go-between, and performs much of the drudgery in the production of the old constitution, as a working lawyer, hunting for precedents, and now and then. uttering a strong word or two, rather two democratical or republican for even C to utter!

We are not told whether the dialogue that produced and illustrated this famous, this wonderful old constitution, was made over the tea-table for twelve successive days, the intervening sabbath excepted, for though the dialogist shows, here and there, the distinguishing marks of the heretic, bis recovered constitution was not a matter sufficiently sacred to be talked of on the Lord's day!

Nor are we told, whether any ladies were present as umpires; for the dialogue is no where disputative, and women are to have no more share in this restored constitution, than if they were not the better half of mankind! I am sure the Major has not found the right constitution; for if the reader will but refer to "The Republican," Vol. 1, p. 45, he will find numerous authorities to shew, that the women held their proper rank and influence in the real Saxon constitution! For my part, I am so much of a woman, or so much for the women, that I vow I will not sign, support, nor assent to any constitution, that excludes the women from their proper influence and fitting stations! We must put younger men than the Major to search for the right constitution! Life is nothing when the women are put out of it. It is by, from, and through them, that all our more pleasing sensations are produced. Women for ever! We will have no monkish constitutions. No Christian constitutions of priests and soldiers!

bad

Was it not that I have to write by measure, a hard task, practice, nonsense producing, and talent-destroying cause, I am sure, that I should have no need to say another word to shew, that the Major wants to impose the wrong constitution upon

us.

That constitution cannot be founded in equal rights that excludes the women from all share of power and influence! Female beauty and God of Love defend me! whilst I declare, that I should have been afraid to have put forth such a plan of a constitution, though safely locked up in a Gaol, in which the infernal Christian system is rigidly observed, of separating and keeping separate the sexes! I should have been afraid, that all bonds, chains, and bars would have been bursted through, to teach me the right way of redres

sing female wrongs, and to compel me when subdued to promise allegiance to the RIGHTS OF WOMEN!

As I have before stated, that Major Cartwright, in the disguise of an affected opponent, had advanced to an avowal of the correctness of Mr. Paine's political principles, it follows, that the sentiments of the dialogue are not wholly objectionable. With much that is really pitiful and contemptible, I find much to admire. For instance, the Major, in one part of his book, shews us most clearly, that a resistance to the present state of things in this country, even if it should bring on a destructive civil war, is justifiable! This is the best part of the dialogue, and is all wound up in the following admirable sentence: "Resistance is therefore not only a right but a duty." But the thing is immediately marred by the following piece of detestable sophistry. "In an age like the present, if the nation be true to itself, Truth is the only weapon of resistance we need to use; for Truth, when by any nation duly attended to, will ever triumph."

After reading with delight what the Major had said about the right and necessity of resistance; the sudden disgust which I felt at coming to this last quoted sentence cannot be described. I accused the Major of hypocrisy! I felt, that by his silence on my persecution, he was in every sense of the word a persecutor of the truth! And, that the truth received more injury, a deeper wound, a more deadly stab, from such conduct as his, than from that of Bankes, Wilberforce, or Castlereagh.

In the year 1819, the Major purchased from me, personally, a copy of Paine's Theological Works, telling me at the time, that he had never read them, and, at my expressing surprise at the circumstance, he said: Why, in truth, I have been told, that on the subject of religion, Paine. meddled with that of which he was not a master. I assured the Major that Paine was a perfect master of the subject, as far as he had carried his opposition to the Christian religion, which was his sole object. The Major said, he should read and judge. Some weeks after, the Major came to my shop again-said he, had read Paine's book: and, on my asking his judgment upon it, he said, that he saw nothing wrong in it, but that more than he expected, to find, Mr. Paine was a very pious man. If not the exact words, this was the exact sense conveyed. I saw the Major frequently afterwards, and he always shewed a deep concern for the result of my prosecutions: but, as was the case

with Mr. Hunt, from the moment that I was in prison upon the verdict of the packed jury, the Major was and has been totally silent, and worse than silent, for au immediate distinction was attempted to be raised, between the Christian Reformers, and the Deistical Reformers, the Political and the Theological Reformers. This I call a persecution of the truth: a criminal conduct in the "Father of Reform:" for had any half dozen of powerful individuals stood well by me, the Government could not have done me the least injury. My shop and private exertions would have speedily paid my fines, and have made me, a tower of strength against the enemy, without putting any friend to a farthing of expence: and there could have been no second imposition of fines until I left this Gaol.

I recollect very well, a respectable public character in London, and a brother of a late Alderman of the City, by no means an acquaintance or private friend of mine, used frequently to step into my shop to talk with a friend often there and once observed: that "if this shop can be kept open and conducted as it is now, nothing corrupt in the country will stand before it." Such was the opinion of many others; ' and such was my opinion, my intention, my hope. It is not too late now to do the thing well. Such a shop would become the rallying point for moral reform, and the fountain-head of truth. And the Major may be assured, that truth will not be a sufficient resistance, until there be such marts for it in every town and village in the country, and free discussion become the unmolested practice of the day.

Again, in an attempt to shew that the constitution knows nothing of Christianity, and in a condemnation of persecution, on the pretence of religion being a part and parcel of the law of the land, the Major has assumed the character of a theological disputant, and we have a long rigmarole in defence of Unitarian Christianity: revealed religion: true religion: natural religion: future life: God and Deity. On these sujects, the Major talks like a priest. Scepticism is called an infirmity of mind; and an Atheist is all but asserted to be a man of an insane mind! The reverse is the fact. Scepticism and Atheism, which are one and the same thing, is the only real proof that the mind is sane and free from disease. Atheism expresses nothing more than a doubt or disbelief of the existence of such a God, as those preach, who confess that they do preach what they know nothing at all about. It is nothing more than a prudent resolution to trust nothing to the imagination; and I felt insulted to find