Mr. Gladstone has told the Agricultural Labourers' Union that he
shall be happy to receive a deputation from them to urge the extension of household suffrage to the counties towards the end of January. This looks as if the Government were pre- pared to redeem the hopes raised by Mr. Forster on behalf of Mr. Gladstone towards the end of the last Session. And we confess we think that they ought to do so. If we yielded house- hold suffrage to the boroughs after the evidence which the Cotton famine gave of the self-possession, the self-denial, and the judge- ment of the artisans, we ought to extend it to the counties, on the evidence afforded by the recent labourers' agitation that the agricultural labourers possess qualities of precisely the same kind,—great sobriety of mind, vast patience, and a dumb, pathetic earnestness. It is high time these men were permitted to speak out their moving, slow-tongued eloquence on the politics of rural England.
