hysique_, whether you be Tory, Radical, Free-trader, or
Protectionist--Protestant or Roman Catholic--Irish, Scotch, or
English--whether you represent a borough or a county--you have a chance
of being heard. The House of Commons, it is true, is a club, but it is
not an exclusive one. All classes are represented there. The Roman
Catholic wolf reposes in it meekly by the side of the Protestant lamb.
There you see, side by side, teetotal Crossley and Bass famed for bitter
beer. Oxford sends there its trained and scholarly churchmanship, and
the manufacturing towns their vigorous dissent. Lowness of birth is no
obstacle to success. Lindsay was a cabin-boy; Fox, a weaver in Norwich
in his youth; poor Brotherton, a factory lad; Ingram cleaned the shoes of
one of his constituents; yet the House gives these men as ready a hearing
as it awards to the inheritors of broad domains and the most illustrious
of historic names. If the House is flunkeyfied, conventional, and
illogical, it is the fault of the public--more flunkeyfied, conventional,
and illogical--whom it represents. Waste not your honest indignation,
but reserve it for the proper parties out of doors. Nor grumble that the
working men have had no representative since their order was represented
by the idiotic and self-seeking Feargus O'Connor, when you remember that,
by means of the freehold land societies, almost any working men who like
to go without beer might in a very short time acquire votes, and,
combined, might carry the counties. Aristocrats, you say, are in the
People's House. Yes, but they are men, most of them, of untainted
honour--of lofty aim--of comprehensive views; and the general fusion and
ventilation of opinion and clash of intellect elicit action most
congenial with the intelligence of the age. Take any of the extreme men,
for instance. What can they do? Are they the representatives of the
mass of opinion? Is the country prepared to break up the National
Church, as Mr. Miall would recommend--to dissolve the Union, as Gavan
Duffy desired--to put down all our armaments, as Mr. Bright would think
proper--to grant the five points of the Charter, as poor Feargus O'Connor
contended? Most certainly not. Yet the representatives of such opinions
are in the House, and rightly in the House. With them away, the opinions
of the people would not be fairly represented. At the same time, it must
be remembered, that such men represent but sections, and i