London, May 21. Today all the London newspapers publish an 
address from the City reformers, or rather their executive 
committee, to the “People of England”.* The style of the 
document is dry, businesslike, not quite as lofty as that of the 
trade circulars that periodically emanate from the same source, 
offering for sale coffee, tea, sugar, spices and other products of 
the tropical countries in a more or less tastefully arranged fabric 
of phrases. The Association” promises to provide the material for a 
veritable physiology of the various government departments and to 
disclose all the mysteries of Downing Street,“ Downing Street 
which is full of hereditary wisdom. This is what it promises. For its 
own part, it demands that the electoral districts of England send to 
Parliament candidates freely chosen according to their hearts’ 
desire and recommended solely by merit, instead of, as hitherto, 
imposed on them by the aristocratic clubs. It thus recognises the 
existing privileged electoral districts as normal, the selfsame 
districts which, in their corruptibility, their reliance on a few clubs, 
their lack of independence, it admits to being the. birthplace of the 
present House of Commons, and thus of the present government. 
It does not want to dissolve these exclusive districts, nor to extend 
them, but simply to moralise. Why not then appeal directly to the 
conscience of the oligarchy itself, instead of threatening it with the 
abolition of its privileges? It should at any rate be an easier job to 
convert the oligarchical heads than the oligarchical electoral 
May 26, 1855.— Ed. 
districts. The City Association would obviously like to bring into 
existence an anti-aristocratic movement, but a movement within 
the limits of the legal (as Guizot called it), the official England. 
And how do they intend to rouse the stagnant bog of electoral 
districts? How to drive them into emancipating themselves from 
interests and customs which make them the vassals of a few select 
clubs and the pillars of the governing oligarchy? With a physiology 
of Downing Street? Not entirely. Also by means of pressure from 
without, by mass meetings and the like. And how are they going to 
set the non-official, non-enfranchised masses in motion so as to 
influence the privileged circle of electoral districts? By inviting 
them to renounce the People’s Charter (which basically contains 
nothing but the demand for universal suffrage and the conditions 
under which alone it can become a reality in England), and to 
acknowledge the privileges of these electoral districts which, by the 
admission of the City reformers themselves, are in the process of 
decay. The City Association must be aware of the example of the 
“financial and parliamentary reformers’. It knows that this 
movement, headed by Hume, Bright, Cobden, Walmsley and 
Thompson, failed because it sought to replace the People’s 
Charter by the so-called Little Charter,’ because it merely 
wanted to make concessions to the masses, merely to reach a 
compromise with them. Do they imagine that without concessions 
they can achieve what the others could not achieve despite their 
concessions? Or do they deduce from the Anti-Corn Law 
movement that it is possible to set the English people in motion 
for partial reforms? But the object of that movement was very 
general, very popular, very tangible. The symbol of the Anti-Corn 
Law League was, as is well known, a big thick loaf of bread in 
contrast to the diminutive loaf of the Protectionists. A loaf of 
bread, particularly in the famine year 1846, naturally speaks quite 
a different popular dialect from a “physiology of Downing 
Street”. We need not recall a well-known booklet, The Physiology of 
the City.* There it is demonstrated with the greatest precision that 
however well the gentkemen may run their own businesses, in the 
management of common enterprises, for example the various 
insurance companies, they more or less faithfully follow the official 
pattern of Downing Street. Their management of the railways; 
with the glaring frauds, swindles and total neglect of safety 
precautions, is so notorious that the question has been raised more 
than once in the press, in Parliament and outside Parliament 
whether the railways should not be placed under direct state 
control and taken out of the hands of the private capitalists! The 
physiology of Downing Street, then, will accomplish nothing — as the 
English say, “This will not do, sir!’”?