As with the press, so is it with Mr. Brougham and all such politicians. They stop short, or, rather, they begin in the middle. They attempt to prevent the evils of the deadly ivy by cropping off, or, rather, bruising a little, a few of its leaves. They do not assail even its branches, while they appear to look upon the trunk as something too sacred even to be looked at with vulgar eyes. Is not the injury recently done to about forty thousand poor families in and near Plymouth, by the Small-note Bill, a thing that Mr. Brougham ought to think about before he thinks anything more about educating those poor families? Yet will he, when he again meets the Ministers, say a word about this monstrous evil? I am afraid that no Member will say a word about it; but I am rather more than afraid that he will not. And why? Because, if he reproach the Ministers with this crying cruelty, they will ask him first how this is to be prevented without a repeal of the Small-note Bill (by which Peel’s Bill was partly repealed); then they will ask him, how the prices are to be kept up without the small-notes; then they will say, “Does the honourable and learned Gentleman wish to see wheat at four shillings a bushel again?”
B. No (looking at Mr. Western and Daddy Coke), no, no, no! Upon my honour, no!
Min. Does the honourable and learned Gentleman wish to see Cobbett again at county meetings, and to see petitions again coming from those meetings, calling for a reduction of the interest of the...?
B. No, no, no, upon my soul, no!
Min. Does the honourable and learned Gentleman wish to see that “equitable adjustment,” which Cobbett has a thousand times declared can never take place without an application, to new purposes, of that great mass of public property, commonly called Church property?
B. (Almost bursting with rage). How dare the honourable gentlemen to suppose me capable of such a thought?
Min. We suppose nothing. We only ask the question; and we ask it, because to put an end to the small-notes would inevitably produce all these things; and it is impossible to have small-notes to the extent necessary to keep up prices, without having, now-and-then, breaking banks. Banks cannot break without producing misery; you must have the consequence if you will have the cause. The honourable and learned Gentleman wants the feast without the reckoning. In short, is the honourable and learned Gentleman for putting an end to “public credit”?
B. No, no, no, no!
Min. Then would it not be better for the honourable and learned Gentleman to hold his tongue?
All men of sense and sincerity will at once answer this last question in the affirmative. They will all say that this is not opposition to the Ministers. The Ministers do not wish to see 40,000 families, nor any families at all (who give them no real annoyance), reduced to misery; they do not wish to cripple their own tax-payers; very far from it. If they could carry on the debt and dead-weight and place and pension and barrack system, without reducing any quiet people to misery, they would like it exceedingly. But they do wish to carry on that system; and he does not oppose them who does not endeavour to put an end to the system.