ling to work, eager to work,
perishing for want of food, and not a soul of your benevolent
Governments will lift a finger to set them to work for it. Give them
public buildings to erect and to be blown up, canals to make, railways
to cut; assist them to emigrate, if you have nothing for them to do at
home, but in Heaven's name be sharp about it!'

'It is really very awkward,' said the Cabinet Minister. 'You see I am
not in the Railroad Department, nor in the Canal Department, nor in the
Emigration Department. I am sure you see that!' he continued hopefully,
looking round upon the crowd, who, though they admitted the fact, did
not appear to appreciate its deep and intrinsic force. 'But I am quite
willing at some future opportunity--indeed, I may say I hope at some
opportunity comparatively not distant, to consider the advisability of
representing the matter to the heads of certain departments who might be
able, in the course of the next but one Septennial Parliament, or' (even
more sanguinely) 'I might under favourable circumstances even hope
to say, the _next_ Septennial Parliament, to lay the topic before the
Government. In the meantime, my friends, consider that such means as you
have suggested for alleviating the hardships with which I so profoundly
sympathise are not things to be lightly rushed into. You will agree with
me doubtless. You will show that fine sense of the propriety of your
lots innate in the breast of every Briton, by agreeing with me that
canals, for instance, are not things to be lightly rushed into.
Emigration, my friends, is not a thing to be lightly rushed into. In the
meantime, knowledge, as the good old maxim tells us, never comes amiss,
and whatever be the eventual scheme resolved upon by Government for
relieving your necessities, you cannot better employ your leisure than
in preparatory academic study of the arts of building, railway cutting,
and canal-making, and in acquainting yourselves with the principles and
methods of emigration, the nature of our different colonial settlements,
their situation and productions, during the seven years that must
inevitably elapse--'

He would have proceeded, but a howl, long and loud, drowned his
utterance, and the mob surged forward, driving him back, in a state
of bewildered astonishment, into the premises of a fashionable dealer.
Various tokens of regard followed him in the shape of rotten eggs and
cabbage leaves, which, as the Owl observed in a thoug