“Heaven knows if I were one of them I should talk wildly myself!”
She spoke to Wilbraham, and he answered her gravely and at some length, for in a theoretical fashion the subject interested him.
“What can you do when there is a mass of bribery on the upper level, and an undisciplined people below? Unhappily the nation is a prey to the miserable system of bargaining, or, as it would be called, of combinazione. Everything, from the prayers of the Church downwards, is to be had for a consideration, and without it too often Justice halts, and Religion makes no sign. Read their own pictures of their own deputies. Until you cure that sore, it seems to me that help is useless.”
“Then you think that bribery and not taxation is the cause of their misery?”
“No doubt the nation is over-taxed, and in consequence its energies are largely spent upon efforts to evade taxation. In this, as may be conceived, the rich are much more successful than the poor, who have fewer means of escape, and are forced from wretchedness to wretchedness, and to yet lower depths again. The richer man lays out something judiciously, and his rating sinks accordingly. The poor man hasn’t got the money to lay out, and he is crushed.”
“Ah, poor souls!” Teresa cried impulsively.
“But,” asked her grandmother, “why don’t they use their vote to get reform?”
“I can’t conceive,” said Wilbraham. “In spite of never-ceasing murmurs against the government of the day, they refuse to recognise that to a large extent they hold the remedy in their own hands. An incredible proportion don’t go to the polls at all, and it is not only the large numbers who obey the Vatican instructions to abstain, but hundreds stay away, I can only suppose, from indifference or hopelessness. Sometimes it seems that they are like children, who can’t look beyond the hour. They have a proverb, ‘An egg to-day is better than a hen to-morrow.’ Contrast this with our ‘bird in the hand,’ which sounds like it and yet has a very different meaning.”
“And still they have such fine qualities!” said Mrs Brodrick.
“Gratitude, for one,” added Teresa.