"If the swells were to come to us, we ought to go to them—remember that, Dick. Very soon there will be no more questions of Tory and Liberal; but only what is the best thing for us. You play your game by the newest rules. As for the old ones, they've seen their day."
Dick left him; but he did not return to the club. He communed beneath the stars, turning over these and other matters in his mind.
"Yes, the old man was right. The old indignation times were over. The long list of crimes which the political agitator could bring against King, Church, Lords, and Commons thirty, forty, fifty years ago, are useless now. They only serve to amuse an audience not too critical."
He was ashamed of what he had himself said about the Lords. Such charges are like the oratory of an ex-minister on the stump—finding no accusation too reckless to be hurled against his enemies.
He was profoundly ambitious. To some men, situated like himself, it might have been a legitimate and sufficient ambition to recover by slow degrees and thrift, and in some trading way, the place in the middle class from which the Coppins had fallen. Not so to Dick Coppin—he cared very little about the former greatness of the Coppins, and the position once occupied by Coppin the builder (his father), before he went bankrupt. He meant secretly something very much greater for himself. He would be a member of Parliament—he would be a working-man's member. There have already been half a dozen working-men's members in the House. Their success has not hitherto been marked, probably because none of them have shown that they know what they want—if, indeed, they want anything. Up to the last few days Dick simply desired in the abstract to be one of them; only, of course, a red-hot Radical—an Irreconcilable.
Now, however, he desired more. His cousin's words and the Chartist's words fell on fruitful soil. He perceived that to become a power in the House one must be able to inform the House on the wants—the programme of his constituents—what they desire, and mean to have. Dick always mentally added that clause, because it belongs to the class of speech in which he had been brought up—"and we mean to have it." You accompany the words with a flourish of the left hand, which is found to be more effective than the right for such purposes. They don't really mean to have it, whatever it may be. But with their audiences it is necessary to put on the appearance of strength before there arises any confidence in strength. Disestablishers of all kinds invariably mean to have it, and the phrase is, perhaps, getting played out.
Dick went home to his lodgings and sat among his books, thinking. He was a man who read. For the sake of being independent, he became a teetotaler—so that, getting good wages, he was rich. He would not marry, because he did not want to be encumbered. He bought such books as he thought would be useful to him, and read them, but no others. He was a man of energy and tenacity, whose chief fault was the entire absence as yet of sympathy and imagination—if these could be supplied in any way, Dick Coppin's course would be assured. For with them would come play of fancy, repartee, wit, illustration, and the graces as well as the strength of oratory.
He went on Monday evening to see Miss Kennedy. He would find out from her, as a beginning, all that she could tell him about the wages of women.
"But I have told you," she said, "I told you all the first night you came here—have you forgotten? Then, I suppose, I must tell you again."