In his chagrin my lord tore the Whip’s letter across and across, and then prudently gummed it together again and locked it away. Certainly the odds were long that it would never be honored; on the one side stood Peel with four-fifths of his Cabinet and half his party, with all the Whigs, all the Radicals, all the League, and the Big Loaf: on the other stood the landed interest! Just the landed interest led by Lord George Bentinck, handsome and debonair, the darling of the Turf, the owner of Crucifix; but hitherto a silent member, and one at whom, as a leader, the world gaped. Only, behind this Joseph there lurked a Benjamin, one whose barbed shafts were many a time to clear the field. The lists were open, the lances were levelled, the slogan of Free Trade was met by the cry of “The Land and the Constitution!” and while old friendships were torn asunder and old allies cut adrift, town and country, forge and field, met in a furious grapple that promised to be final.
If, amid the dust of such a conflict, the riot at Riddsley obtained a passing notice in London, intense it may be believed was the excitement which it caused in the borough. Hatton and Banfield and their men went about, vowing to take vengeance at the hustings. The mayor went about, swearing in constables. The farmers and their allies went about grinning. Fights took place nightly behind the Packhorse and the Portcullis, while very old ladies, peering over their blinds, talked of the French Revolution, and very young ones thought that the Militia, adequately officered, should be brought into the town.
The spirit of which Basset had given proof was blazoned about; and he gained in another way. He was one of those to whom a spice of danger is a fillip, whom a little peril shakes out of themselves. On the day after the riot he came upon a score of people collected round a Cheap Jack in the market. The man presently closed his patter and his stall, and, on the impulse of the moment, Basset took his place and made the crowd a speech as short as it was simple. He told them that in his opinion it was impossible to keep food out of the country by a tax while Ireland was threatened by famine. Secondly, that the sacrifice which Peel was making of his party, his reputation, and his consistency was warrant that in his view the change was urgently needed. Thirdly, he asked them whether the farmers were so prosperous and the laborers so comfortable that change must be for the worse. But here he came on delicate ground; murmurs arose and some hisses, and he broke off good-humoredly, thanked the crowd, which had grown to a good size, and, stepping down from his barrow, he walked away amid plaudits. The thing was reported, and though the Tories sneered at it as a hole-and-corner meeting, Farthingale held another view. He told Mr. Stubbs that it was a neat thing—very well done.
Stubbs grunted. “Will it change a vote?” he growled.
“Change a——”
“Will it change a vote, man? You heard what I said.”
“Lord, no!” the clerk answered. “I never said it would!”
“Then why trouble about it?” Stubbs retorted fretfully. “Get on with those poll-cards! I don’t pay you a guinea a day at election time to praise monkey-tricks.”
For Stubbs was not happy. He knew, indeed, that the breaking-up of the open-air meeting had been fairly successful. It had brought back two votes to the fold; and he calculated that the seat would be held. But by a majority how narrow, how fallen, how discreditable! He blushed to think of it.
And other things made him unhappy. Those who are politicians by trade are like cardplayers, who play for the game’s sake; one game lost, they cut and deal as keenly as before. Behind the politicians, however, are a few to whom the stake is something; and of these was Stubbs. To him, as we know, the Corn-Tax was no mere toll, but the protection of agriculture, the well-head that guarded the pure waters, the fence that saved from smoke and steam, from slag-heap and brickfield, the smiling face of England. For him, the home of his fathers, the land of field and stubble, of plough and pinfold, was at stake; nay, was passing, wasted by men who thought in percentages and saw no farther than the columns of their ledgers. To that England of his memory—whether it had ever existed in fact or no—a hundred associations bound the lawyer; things tender and things true; quaint memories of his first turkey’s nest, of the last load of the harvest, of the loosened plough horses straying to the water at the close of day, of the flat paintings of the Durham Ox and the Coke Ram that adorned the farm parlor.