“Dang me,” he said that evening to his cronies in the tap of the White Lion at Bristol, “if I feel so sure about this here Reform! We want none of that nasty neck-cutting here! And if I thought Froggy was right I’m blest if I wouldn’t turn Tory!”
And for certain the Frenchman voiced what a large section of the timid and the well-to-do were thinking. For something like a hundred and fifty years a small class, the nobility and the greater gentry, turning to advantage the growing defects in the representation—the rotten boroughs and the close corporations—had ruled the country through the House of Commons. Was it to be expected that the basis of power could be shifted in a moment? Or that all these boroughs and corporations, in which the governing class were so deeply interested, could be swept away without a convulsion; without opening the floodgates of change, and admitting forces which no man could measure? Or, on the other side, was it likely that, these defects once seen and the appetite of the middle class for power once whetted, their claims could be refused without a struggle from which the boldest must flinch? No man could say for certain, and hence these fears in the air. The very winds carried them. They were being discussed in that month of April not only on the White Lion coach, not on the Bath road only, but on a hundred coaches, and a hundred roads over the length and breadth of England. Wherever the sway of Macadam and Telford extended, wherever the gigs of “riders” met, or farmers’ carts stayed to parley, at fair and market, sessions and church, men shook their heads or raised their voices in high debate; and the word Reform rolled down the wind!
Vaughan soon overcame his qualms; for his opinions were fixed. But he thought that the subject might serve him with his neighbour, and he addressed her.
“You must not let them alarm you,” he said. “We are still a long way, I fancy, from guillotines or barricades.”
“I hope so,” she answered. “In any case I am not afraid.”
“Why, if I may ask?”
She glanced at him with a gleam of humour in her eyes. “Little shrubs feel little wind,” she murmured.
“But also little sun, I fear,” he replied.
“That does not follow,” she said, without raising her eyes again. “Though it is true that I—I am so seldom free in a morning that a journey such as this, with the sunshine, is like heaven to me.”
“The morning is a delightful time,” he said.