We cannot repeat too often that in England the progress to democracy has never been made on assumptions of an abstract right to vote.

We have come to democracy by experience, and this experience has taught us that people who are taxed insist, sooner or later, on having a voice in the administration of the national exchequer.

But we have never admitted "personality" as a title to enfranchisement.
[Illustration: THE GORDON RIOTS _From the Painting by Seymour Lucas, R.A._] Cartwright followed with the multitude of political writers of his time to deduce a right to vote, and his deduction is as worthless as the rest of the _a priori_ reasoning.

But the brave old man--he was tried for "sedition" at the age of eighty in the Government panic of 1820--was an entirely disinterested champion of the poor and a real lover of liberty.

He believed the affairs of government ought to be a matter of common concern, and that they were quite within the capacities of ordinary men.
Cartwright's life--much more than his writings--kept the democratic ideal unshaken in the handful of "Radical Reformers" who survived the Tory reaction on the war with the French Republic in 1793, and his glowing enthusiasm helped to kindle the fire for political enfranchisement that was burning in the hearts of the manufacturing population by 1818.