Shortly—I say, with habitual bonhomie,
Everything's quite as we Ministers wish,
Plenty and peace are combined with economy,
Food is abundant—provide you the dish.
Pay to the foreigner,
Peasant and mariner,
All you can raise for your loaf and your fish.
XVII.
Banish all notions of British ascendency,
Let them be wiped from our memory quite;
Modern views have an opposite tendency,
As hath been clearly expounded by Bright.
Let us be sensible—
Britain's defensible,
Not by brute force, but by maxims of right.
XVIII.
We, for the voice of the populace amorous,
Willing to do anything they require,
Shall, if hereafter they chance to grow clamorous,
Yield just precisely the thing they desire:
We are quite ready to
March with a steady toe
Out of the frying-pan into the fire.
XIX.
Stink, like the inmates of Huxtable's piggery,
Up to the knees in an exquisite draff,
Stand the determined apostles of Whiggery,
Chewing the grain, and rejecting the chaff.
Ay, Mr Huxtable!
Not from your muck stable,
Issues so hearty a grunting or laugh!
XX.
This, I maintain, of our state is the very type—
Joseph's fat cattle and atrophied kine.
We, for the first, may be ta'en by Daguerreotype:
Who are the second, you well may divine.
Yea, of a verity!
Britain's prosperity,
Means nothing else than the measure of mine!