ADDRESSES AND LITERARY REMAINS. AN ADDRESS Delivered at the Opening of the Working Men's Insti * tute, on Monday, Cctober 23rd, 1848, by the Rev. Fred. W. Robertson, M.A. BROTHER MEN AND FELLOW-TOWNSMEN, I OWE it to you and I owe it to myself to give some explanation of my being here to-night to deliver an opening address to the Working Men's Institute. I owe it to you, or rather to some of you, since it is only a few weeks ago that, on the plea of ill health, I professed myself unable to deliver a lecture to the Brighton Athenæum. Almost immediately after that I accepted your invitation, in which there is an apparent inconsistency. I owe it to myself, * A third edition of this Pamphlet having been called for, I have sent it to the press unaltered; for though the Working Men's Institute, owing to certain errors in the details of its organization, has for the present ended in partial failure, yet the very circumstances of its history have only confirmed me more than ever in the principles which it was attempted to express in the following pages.-F. W. R., Oct. 1850. B because there will lie against me in the judgment of many a charge of presumption. I have been in this town but a single year. I am but a stranger here. For one without name, without influence, without authority, without talent, to occupy a position so prominent as that which I occupy to-night, would really seem to justify a suspicion of something like vanity and assumption. My reasons for undertaking this office are these. I did it partly on personal grounds. It would be affectation to deny that the spontaneous request of a body of men delegated by a thousand of my fellow-townsmen is a source of very great satisfaction. It gave me great pleasure, at the same time that it deeply humbled me. I earnestly wish I were more worthy of the confidence reposed in me. My second reason for standing before you to-night is a public one. It seems to me a significant circumstance that your request was made to a clergyman of the Church of England. A minister of the Church of England occupies a very peculiar position. He stands, generally by birth, always by position, between the higher and lower ranks. He has free access to the mansion of the noble, and welcome in the cottage of the labourer. And if I understand aright the mission of a minister of the Church of England, his peculiar and sacred call is, to stand as a link of union between the two extremes of society; to demand of the highest in this land, with all respect but yet firmly, the performance of their duty to those beneath them; to soften down the asperities and to soothe the burning jealousies which are too often found rankling in the minds of those who, from a position full of wretchedness, look up with almost excusable bitterness on such as are surrounded with earthly comforts. It seemed to me that such an opportunity was offered me to-night. The delivery of a lecture to the Brighton Athenæum on a literary subject was a secular duty, and one from which I felt I might fairly shrink on the valid plea of ill health; but the demand that you made upon me for this evening, though I urged it upon you that you had not selected the right man, was a sacred duty, which I felt it was impossible for me on any merely personal grounds to refuse. And if your call on a minister of the Church of England this evening may be taken as any exhibition of trust in the sympathy of those classes between whom and yourselves he stands as a kind of link-if my acceptance of the call may be regarded as evincing a pledge of their sympathy towards you-then, though all I say to-night may be weak and worthless, I shall not feel that I have spoken to you in vain, and to myself at least I shall stand acquitted of the charge of presumption. I began to address you to-night by the name of brother men; I did not adopt the expression which my friend Mr. Holtham used in reference to your Committee. Yet, after all, we are at one. He did not mean to say that you are "gentlemen." He meant to say that you have, and that there was no reason why you should not have, the feelings of gentlemen. To say that a man is noble, does not mean that he is a nobleman. I do not call you gentlemen, because I respect you too much to call you what you are not. You are not gentlemen: To address an assembly of gentlemen by the title of "my lords" would be to insult them; and to address working men as "gentlemen " would be felt by you as an insult to your understanding. The people of this country stand in danger from two classes-from those who fear them, and from those who flatter them. From those who fear them and would keep down their aspiring intelligence, they have no longer much to fear. The time is past for that ; that cry of a wretched, narrow bigotry is almost unheard of now. But just in proportion as that danger has passed away has the other danger increased-the danger from those who flatter them. From the platform and the press we now hear language of fulsome adulation, that ought to disgust the working men of this country. There has ever been and ever will be found sycophancy on the side of power. In former ages, when power was on the side of the few, the flatterer was found in kings' houses. The balance of power is changed. It is now not in the hands of the few, but in the hands of the many. I say not that that is the best state conceivable; there might be a better than that. We would rather have power neither in the hands of the privileged few nor in the hands of the privileged many, but in the hands of the wisest and best. But this is the present fact, and every day is carrying the tide of power more strongly into the hands of the numbers; for which reason there will be ever found flatterers on the side of the many. man. Now, whether a man flatters the many or the few, the flatterer is a despicable character. It matters not in what age he appears: change the century, you do not change the He who fawned upon the prince or upon the duke had something of the reptile in his character; but he who fawns upon the masses in their day of power is only a reptile which has changed the direction of its crawling. who in this nineteenth century echoes the cry that the voice of the people is the voice of God, is just the man who, if he had been born two thousand years ago, would have been the loudest and hoarsest in that cringing crowd of slaves who He bowed before a prince invested with the delegated majesty of Rome, and cried, "It is the voice of a god, and not of a man." The man who can see no other source of law than the will of a majority, who can feel no everlasting law of right and wrong, which gives to all human laws their sanction and their meaning, and by which all laws, whether they express the will of the many or of the few, must be tried-who does not feel that he, single and unsupported, is called upon by a mighty voice within him to resist everything which comes to him claiming his allegiance as the expression of mere willis exactly the man who, if he had lived seven centuries ago, would have stood on the sea-sands beside the royal Dane, and tried to make him believe that his will gave law to the everlasting flood. I have For this reason I have not used this expression. not used it, because I would not flatter you even by an epithet. I respect you too much to flatter you. I used another title of address. For there are two bases of union on which men may be bound together. One is similarity of class, the other is identity of nature. The class feeling is a feeble bond; for he who feels awe for another man because he is in a rank above him, will cease to feel that awe if ever the man should cease to belong to that class. The pauperised aristocrat and the decayed merchant are soon neglected by their class. The man who respects another because he is in the same rank as himself may cease to feel respect in one of two ways either by his own elevation, in which case he tries to keep the distinction broad between himself and the class that he has left, or else by the depression of that other man, through any misfortune. Now, there is another and a broader bond of union to be |