ing more; let the Conservatism that would preserve cut _it_
away. Did no wood-forester apprise you that a dead bough with its dead
root left sticking there is extraneous, poisonous; is as a dead iron
spike, some horrid rusty ploughshare driven into the living
substance;--nay is far worse; for in every wind-storm ('commercial
crisis' or the like), it frets and creaks, jolts itself to and fro,
and cannot lie quiet as your dead iron spike would.

If I were the Conservative Party of England (which is another bold
figure of speech), I would not for a hundred thousand pounds an hour
allow those Corn-Laws to continue! Potosi and Golconda put together
would not purchase my assent to them. Do you count what treasuries of
bitter indignation they are laying up for you in every just English
heart? Do you know what questions, not as to Corn-prices and
Sliding-scales alone, they are _forcing_ every reflective Englishman
to ask himself? Questions insoluble, or hitherto unsolved; deeper
than any of our Logic-plummets hitherto will sound: questions deep
enough,--which it were better that we did not name even in thought!
You are forcing us to think of them, to begin uttering them. The
utterance of them is begun; and where will it be ended, think you?
When two millions of one's brother-men sit in Workhouses, and five
millions, as is insolently said, 'rejoice in potatoes,' there are
various things that must be begun, let them end where they can.

CHAPTER VI.

TWO CENTURIES.

The Settlement effected by our 'Healing Parliament' in the Year of
Grace 1660, though accomplished under universal acclamations from the
four corners of the British Dominions, turns out to have been one of
the mournfulest that ever took place in this land of ours. It called
and thought itself a Settlement of brightest hope and fulfilment,
bright as the blaze of universal tar-barrels and bonfires could make
it: and we find it now, on looking back on it with the insight which
trial has yielded, a Settlement as of despair. Considered well, it was
a Settlement to govern henceforth without God, with only some decent
Pretence of God.

Governing by the Christian Law of God had been found a thing of
battle, convulsion, confusion, an infinitely difficult thing:
wherefore let us now abandon it, and govern only by so much of God's
Christian Law as--as may prove quiet and convenient for us. What is
the end of Government? To guide men in the way wherein they should go