Nosebag. Well, I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard the pints. I did think to have a little more light in my back room, but now the ’tatoes have made it impossible. We’re to have the window-tax still.
Slowgoe. I must confess it; not that I ever expect anything from the Whigs—still I did look for some fall in soap. I thought washing might be made a little cheaper; but, as you say, Mr Nutts, the taxes keep us still in our dirt.
Peabody. And then in the matter of tea——
Mrs Nutts. What’s that about tea?
Nutts. Of course. Put politics in a teapot, and you women will listen to ’em directly. Why, the tea won’t come down a halfpenny. And why not? Because of the ’tatoes. The potato’s the real root of evil.
Peabody. And the first is—eight millions of money for Ireland. Eight millions more of debt to be laid upon the innocent shoulders of unborn babes.
Mrs Nutts. Dear little creturs!
Nutts. Still it can’t be helped. As a policeman and once a schoolmaster, you must own this, Mr Peabody, the famishing must be fed.
Peabody. He’s no better than a stone that denies it. Nevertheless, it is a little hard that for so many years there should be a running account of misery and profit between tenants and landlords; and at the last, when misery sinks to famine, we should be called on to make up the balance, pocketed years ago by others. There’s a passage, I remember, in Mr Disraeli’s—I don’t mean young Benjamin’s—“Curiosities,” that’s taken from a sermon, and it runs somehow so: “If you ladies and gentlemen who are fattening on your pleasures, and wear scarlet clothes—I believe, if you were put in a good press, we should see the blood of the poor gush out with which your scarlet is dyed.” Now, if a good many Irish landlords were squeezed after this fashion, their pockets would run scarlet too.
Nutts. Didn’t Sir Walter Rawley bring potatoes from the New World? I thought so. ’Pon my life! when I think of it, they almost seem as if they’d been sent from the New World to revenge the wickedness she’d suffered from the Old. We made slaves with whips and chains; and the New World, waiting her time—for the wheel of right and wrong comes round, let it turn ever so slowly—makes slaves with potatoes. What do you think of that, Mr Peabody?