"You will grant at any rate that, having once adopted it, the Lords exalted it to rank as a principle."
"Yes, and for a time with amazing success. That was their capital error.… Have you never observed, my good Bonaday, how fatally miracles come home to roost? Jonah spends three days and three nights in the whale's belly—why? Simply to get his tale believed. Credo quia impossibile seldom misses to work well for a while. He doesn't foresee, poor fellow, that what makes his fortune with one generation of men will wreck his credit with another.… So with the House of Lords—though here a miracle triumphantly pointed out as happening under men's eyes was never really happening at all. That in the loins of every titled legislator should lie the germ of another is a miracle (I grant you) of the first order, and may vie with Jonah's sojourn in the whale's belly; nay, it deserved an even longer run for its money, since it persuaded people that they saw the miraculous succession. But Nature was taking care all the time that it never happened. Actually our peerages have perished, and new ones have been born at an astonishing rate; about half of them at this moment are younger than the great Reform Bill. A shrewd American remarked the other day, that while it is true enough a son may not inherit his father's ability, yet if the son of a Rothschild can keep the money his father made he must in these days of liquid securities be a pretty able fellow. Weaklings (added my American) don't last long, at any rate in our times. 'God and Nature turn out the incompetents almost as quickly as would the electorate.'… But my point is that the House of Lords, having in the past exploited this supposed miracle for all it was worth, are now (if the Liberals have any sense) to be faced with the overdraft which every miracle leaves to be paid sooner or later. The longer-headed among the Peers perceived this some years ago; they all see it now, and are tumbling over each other in their haste to dodge the 'hereditary principle' somehow. It is for the Liberals to hold them firmly to the dear old miracle and rub their noses in it. So, and so only, will this electorate of ours rid itself, under a misapprehension, of a real peril, to which, if able to see the thing in its true form and dimensions, it would in all likelihood yield itself grovelling."
"Eh? I don't follow—"
"I tell you, Bonaday, the House of Lords is in fact no hereditary curse at all. What the devil has it to do with the claims of old descent? Does it contain a man whose ancestor ever saw Agincourt? Bankers, brewers, clothiers, mine-owners, company-promoters, journalists—our Upper House to-day is a compact, fairly well-selected body of men who have pushed to success over their fellows. Given such a body of supermen, well agreed among themselves, and knowing what they want, supplied with every temptation to feed on the necessities of the weak, armed with extravagant legal powers, even fortified with a philosophy in the sham Darwin doctrine that, with nations as with men, the poverty of one is the wealth of another—there, my dear sir, you have a menace against which, could they realise it, all moderate citizens would be fighting for their lives.… But it is close upon dinner-time, and I refuse to extend these valuable but parenthetical remarks on the House of Lords one whit farther to please your irresolution.… It's high time Corona went to school."
"I have not been well lately, as you know, Brother. I meant all along, as soon as I picked up my strength again, to—"
"Tilly vally, tilly vally!" snapped Brother Copas. "Since we are making excuses shall we add that, without admitting ourselves to be snobs, we have remarked a certain refinement—a delicacy of mind—in Corona, and doubt if the bloom of it will survive the rough contact of a public elementary school?… Come, I've thought of that, as a godfather should. You're aware that, a couple of years ago, a small legacy dropped in upon me—a trifling windfall of ten guineas a year. Well, I've been wasting it on luxuries—a few books I don't read, a more expensive brand of tobacco, which really is no better than the old shag, some extra changes of body-linen. Now since the Education Act of 1902 the fees in the public secondary day schools have been cut down to a figure quite ridiculously low, and the private day schools have been forced to follow suit. I dare say that seven pounds a year will send Corona, say, to Miss Dickinson's genteel seminary—nay, I'll undertake to beat the lady down to that sum—and I shall still be left with three pounds and ten shillings to squander on shirts. Now if you start thanking me—Ah, there goes the dinner-bell! Hurry, man—you're first on the roster!"
CHAPTER XV.
CANARIES AND GREYCOATS.
So Corona was sent to school; but not, as it befell, to Miss Dickinson's.