Liberal' as a course of action such as this? The belief naturally
to be deduced from such statements, nay, the unavoidable conviction on
the minds--of, at any rate, the Conservative newspapers--was that Mr
Melmotte had accumulated an immense fortune, and that he had never
robbed any shareholder of a shilling.

The friends of Melmotte had moreover a basis of hope, and were enabled
to sound premonitory notes of triumph, arising from causes quite
external to their party. The 'Breakfast Table' supported Melmotte, but
the 'Breakfast Table' was not a Conservative organ. This support was
given, not to the great man's political opinions, as to which a
well-known writer in that paper suggested that the great man had
probably not as yet given very much attention to the party questions
which divided the country,--but to his commercial position. It was
generally acknowledged that few men living,--perhaps no man alive,--
had so acute an insight into the great commercial questions of the age
as Mr Augustus Melmotte. In whatever part of the world he might have
acquired his commercial experience,--for it had been said repeatedly
that Melmotte was not an Englishman,--he now made London his home and
Great Britain his country, and it would be for the welfare of the
country that such a man should sit in the British Parliament. Such
were the arguments used by the 'Breakfast Table' in supporting Mr
Melmotte. This was, of course, an assistance;--and not the less so
because it was asserted in other papers that the country would be
absolutely disgraced by his presence in Parliament. The hotter the
opposition the keener will be the support. Honest good men, men who
really loved their country, fine gentlemen, who had received unsullied
names from great ancestors, shed their money right and left, and grew
hot in personally energetic struggles to have this man returned to
Parliament as the head of the great Conservative mercantile interests
of Great Britain!

There was one man who thoroughly believed that the thing at the
present moment most essentially necessary to England's glory was the
return of Mr Melmotte for Westminster. This man was undoubtedly a very
ignorant man. He knew nothing of any one political question which had
vexed England for the last half century,--nothing whatever of the
political history which had made England what it was at the beginning
of that half century. Of such names as Hampden, Somers, and Pitt he
had hardly ever he