“They will not dare!” Brougham cried.
“Pshaw! You are Samson, but you are shorn of your strength. They have been too clever for you. While you were in the Commons they did not dare. Harry Brougham was their master. So they lured you, poor fool, into the trap, into the Lords, where you may spout, and spout, and spout, and it will have as much effect as the beating of a bird’s wings against the bars of its cage!”
“They will not dare!” Brougham reiterated.
“You will see. They will throw you aside.”
Brougham walked up and down the room, his eyes glittering, his quaint, misshapen features working passionately.
“They will throw you aside,” Mr. Cornelius repeated, watching him keenly. “You are a man of the people. You are in earnest. You are honestly in favour of retrenchment, of education, of reform. But to these Whigs—save and except to Althorp, who is that lusus naturæ, an honest man, and to Johnny Russell, who is a fanatic—these are but catchwords, stalking-horses, the means by which, after the dull old fashion of their fathers and their grandfathers and their great-grandfathers, they think to creep into power. Reform, if reform means the representation of the people by the people, the rule of the people by the people, or by any but the old landed families—why, the very thought would make them sick!”
Brougham stopped in his pacing to and fro. “You are right,” he said sombrely.
“You acknowledge it?”
“I have known it—here!” And, drawing himself to his full height, he clapped his hand to his breast. “I have known it here for months. Ay, and though I have sworn to myself that they would not dare to treat me as they treated Burke, and Sheridan, and Tierney, and as they would have treated Canning, I knew it was a lie, my lad; I knew they would. My mother—ay, my old mother, sitting by the chimneyside, out of the world there, knew it, and warned me.”
“Then why did you go into the Lords?” Cornelius asked. “Why be lured into the gilded cage, where you are helpless?”