"For a select committee to consider the propriety of establishing a cheap PRINTED BY W. BARNES, BRIDGE-HOUSE PLACE, NEWINGTON CAUSEWAY. 1832. 22486.7 JAN 3 1907 LIBRARY The gift Ernest Даж OBJECTS OF THE UNION. 1. To obtain a full, free, and effectual, Representation of the People in the Commons' House of Parliament. 2. To support the King and his Ministers against a corrupt Faction, in accomplishing their great measure of Parliamentary Reform. 3. To watch over and promote the Interests, and to better the Condition of the INDUSTRIOUS and WORKING CLASSES. 4. TO OBTAIN THE ABOLITION OF ALL TAXES ON KNOWLEDGE, and to assist in the diffusion of sound moral and political information. 5. To join every well-wisher to his Country, from the richest to the poorest, in the pursuit of these important objects. 6. To preserve Peace and Order in the Country, and to guard against any convulsion, which the Enemies of the People may endeavour to bring about. Mr. EDWARD LYTTON BULWER said, that. in rising to move certain resolutions for the repeal of the principal 'taxes on knowledge, he trusted that his deep and conscientious conviction of the necessity of the measure he was about to propose, would be a sufficient excuse for undertaking a task which, if as important as he believed it to be, was equally above his abilities and his station in public life: those were not light or ordinary motives which, supporting as he did the present administration, could induce him to bring forward a measure, not, he trusted, opposed, but certainly not sanctioned by them, and which must necessarily be of a nature that it would better suit their convenience to leave to their own time and their own discretion to determine; but the motives by which he was actuated had been so long nursed, and were so strongly felt, that he conscientiously believed they left him no alternative for, when he looked round and saw the dangerous effects of those taxes in daily operation-when he saw the numberless pernicious, and visionary publications which were circulated in defiance of laws, which, having lost the sanction of public opinion (as his majesty's attorney-general so justly remarked some time ago), had lost the power of being carried, with prudence, into effect-when he saw, that, while the cheap dangerous publication was not checked, they suppressed the cheap reply: for those who would reply were honest and well-affected men; and men honest and well-affected would not break, while they lamented, that law which at present forbade the publication of cheap political periodicals-when he looked round and saw the results of that ignorance which the laws he desired to abolish fostered and encouraged, breaking forth |