‘Repeal of the corn laws is a contemptible device of manufacturing selfishness. It means low wages. Do you suppose the great Manchester cotton lords care one straw for their hands? Not they! They will face a revolution for repeal because it will enable them to grind an extra profit out of us.’
‘I agree with you entirely,’ said Dennis, turning to Clara, ‘that a tax upon food is wrong; it is wrong in the abstract. The notion of taxing bread, the fruit of the earth, is most repulsive; but the point is—what is our policy to be? If a certain end is to be achieved, we must neglect subordinate ends, and, at times, even contradict what our own principles would appear to dictate. That is the secret of successful leadership.’
He took up the poker and stirred the fire.
‘That will do, Dennis,’ said Marshall, who was evidently fidgety. ‘The room is rather warm. There’s nothing in Vincent which irritates me more than those bits of poetry with which he winds up.
“God made the man—man made the slave,”
and all that stuff. If God made the man, God made the slave. I know what Vincent’s little game is, and it is the same game with all his set. They want to keep Chartism religious, but we shall see. Let us once get the six points, and the Established Church will go, and we shall have secular education, and in a generation there will not be one superstition left.’
‘Theological superstition, you mean?’ said Clara.
‘Yes, of course, what others are there worth notice?’
‘A few. The superstition of the ordinary newspaper reader is just as profound, and the tyranny of the majority may be just as injurious as the superstition of a Spanish peasant, or the tyranny of the Inquisition.’
‘Newspapers will not burn people as the priests did and would do again if they had the power, and they do not insult us with fables and a hell and a heaven.’