"You hold subversive views, Burleigh—views to which the public mind is not educated up, nor will be in this generation," said Mr. Chiverton. "The old order of things will last my time."
"Changes move fast now-a-days," said Mr. Fairfax. "I should like to see a constitutional remedy provided for the Giffords of the gentry before I depart. We are too near neighbors to be friends, and Morte adjoins my property."
"Gifford was brought up in a bad school—a vaporing fellow, not true to any of his obligations," said Mr. Oliver Smith.
"It is Blagg, his agent, who is responsible," began Mr. Chiverton.
Mr. Oliver Smith interrupted contemptuously: "When a landlord permits an agent to represent him without supervision, and refuses to look into the reiterated complaints of his tenants, he gives us leave to suppose that his agent does him acceptable service."
"I have remonstrated with him myself, but he is cynically indifferent to public opinion," said Mr. Forbes.
"The public opinion that condemns a man and dines with him is not of much account," said Mr. Oliver Smith, with a glance at Mr. Chiverton, the obnoxious Gifford's very good friend.
"Would you have him cut?" demanded Mr. Chiverton. "I grant you that it is a necessary precaution to have his words in black and white if he is to be bound by them—"
"You could not well say worse of a gentleman than that, Chiverton—eh?" suggested Mr. Fairfax.
There was a minute's silence, and then Mr. Forbes spoke: "I should like our legal appointments to include advocates of the poor, men of integrity whose business it would be to watch over the rights and listen to the grievances of those classes who live by laborious work and are helpless to resist powerful wrong. Old truth bears repeating: these are the classes who maintain the state of the world—the laborer that holds the plough and whose talk is of bullocks, the carpenter, the smith, and the potter. All these trust to their hands, and are wise in their work, and when oppression comes they must seek to some one of leisure for justice. It is a pitiful thing to hear a poor man plead, 'Sir, what can I do?' when his heart burns with a sense of intolerable wrong, and to feel that the best advice you can give him is that he should bear it patiently."