e cautiously
call him--has been visiting us, and invited me to sit on the platform and
give the speeches my moral support. I like our candidate, who is young,
ardent, good-natured, and keeps his temper when he is heckled; seems,
indeed, to enjoy being heckled, and conciliates his opponents by that
bright pugnacity which a true Briton loves better than anything else in
politics. I appreciate, too, the compliment he pays me. But I wish he
would not choose to put his ardour in competition with Sirius and the
dog-days; and I heartily wish he had not brought down Mr. Blank, M.P.,
to address us in his support.

Mr. Blank and I have political opinions which pass, for convenience, under
a common label. Yet there are few men in England whose attitude of mind
towards his alleged principles I more cordially loathe. Not to put too
fine a point upon it, I think him a hypocrite. But he has chosen the side
which is mine, and I cannot prevent his saying a hundred things which I
believe.

We will suppose that Mr. Blank is a far honester fellow than I am able to
think him. Still, and at the best, he is a sort of composite photograph
of your average Member of Parliament--the type of man to whom Great
Britain commits the direction of her affairs and, by consequence, her
well-doing and her well-being and her honour. Liberal or Conservative,
are not the features pretty much the same? a solid man, well past fifty,
who has spent the prime of his life in business and withdrawn from it with
a good reputation and a credit balance equally satisfactory to himself and
his bankers. Or it may be that he has not actually retired but has turned
to politics to fill up those leisure hours which are the reward or
vexation (as he chooses to look at them) of a prosperous man of business;
for, as Bagehot pointed out, the life of a man of business who employs his
own capital, and employs it nearly always in the same way, is by no means
fully employed. "If such a man is very busy, it is a sign of something
wrong. Either he is working at detail, which subordinates would do
better, or he is engaged in too many speculations." In consequence our
commerce abounds with men of great business ability and experience who,
being short of occupation, are glad enough to fill up their time with work
in Parliament, as well as proud to write M.P. after their names.
For my part I can think of nothing better calculated to reassure anyone
whose dreams are haunted by