As an answer it was ridiculous enough, about as valuable a contribution, to the question in hand, as the suggestion of the luckless queen, that, if the poor people had no bread to eat, they might eat cakes instead. But it had one significant passage.
The young fellow, flushed and excited by his own pertness, lost his head and with it his manners.
“The honourable gentleman,” he said, pointing offensively in the direction, where John Drury sat quietly listening to him; “the honourable gentleman has made an eloquent appeal for the idle, for the improvident, for all who go to make up what are rightly called the dangerous classes. Well, Sir, in this House we go in for the representation of minorities, and though I am thankful to think that the dangerous classes are in the minority in this country, it is, no doubt, according to the latest political lights, fit and proper that they, too, should find their representative in this House.”
The speaker had got thus far, when several of the men on our side of the House began to interrupt with cries of “Oh, oh,” which were somewhat hotly responded to, by cheers from some of the men in the immediate vicinity of the speaker. Goaded by the hostility and the applause, the speaker flung out one last defiant, insolent sentence.
“Yes, Sir, the dangerous classes must have their representative in this House, and where could they, by any possibility, find a better representative than a convicted felon——”
He was not allowed to finish the sentence. The hubbub that arose of angry groans and defiant cheers—for I am sorry to say that the foolish young gentleman had his backers—drowned the rest of his sentence, and he sat down amidst a display of the stormiest excitement on both sides of the House.
The noble Lord.
I have seen bad and bitter scenes in St. Stephen’s, but never a worse, never a bitterer scene than on that night. Men who, I know, in their hearts did not associate the name of John Drury with any stain, took sides with his assailant and cheered vociferously for the savage attack that had just been made upon him.
Drury’s speech had been a severe arraignment of the Government, and the Ministerialists were sore and angry, and they took their revenge unchivalrously, as even civilized men will still occasionally do.