“Rights and duties, squire. The Reform Bill happens to be both. When is The Bill to be settled?”
“Nothing is settled, Sam, until it is settled right.”
“Lord Brougham, in a speech at Manchester, told us he would see it settled this session.”
“Lord Brougham thinks in impossibilities. He would make a contract with Parliament to govern England, or even Ireland. Let me tell thee all government is a thing of necessity, not of choice. England will not for any Bill dig under her foundations. Like Time, she destroys even great wrongs slowly. Her improvements hev to grow and sometimes they take a good while about it. You hev been crying for this Bill for forty years, you were not ready for it then. Few of you at that time hed any education. Now, many of your men can read and a lesser number write. Such men as Grey, Russell, Brougham and others hev led and taught you, and there’s no denying that you hev been varry apt scholars. Take your improvements easily, Sam. You won’t make any real progress by going over precipices.”
“Well, sir, we at least hev truth on our side.”
“Truth can only be on one side, Sam, I’m well pleased if you hev it.”
“All right, squire, but I can tell you this—if Parliament doesn’t help us varry soon now we will help oursens.”
“That is what you ought to be doing right now. Get agate, men! Go to your new loom, and make yersens masters of it. I will promise you in that case, that your new life will be, on the whole, better than the old one. As for going back to the old life, you can’t do it. Not for your immortal souls! Time never runs back to fetch any age of gold; and as for making a living in the old way and with the old hand loom, you may as well sow corn in the sea, and hope to reap it.”
“Squire, I want to get out of a country where its rulers can stop minding its desperate poverty, and can forget that it is on the edge of rebellion, and in the grip of some death they call cholera, and go home for their Easter holiday, quite satisfied with themsens. We want another Oliver Cromwell.”
“No, we don’t either. The world won’t be ready for another Cromwell, not for a thousand years maybe. Such men are only born at the rate of one in a millennium.”