The Speech of Charles C. Western, Esq. M.P. on the Distressed State of the Agriculture of the Country, delivered in the House of Commons, March 7, 1816.
The Speech of Henry Brougham, Esq. M.P. on the same subject, delivered in the same place, April 9, 1816.
This is a sore subject; and it is here handled with much tenderness and delicacy. It puts one in mind of the traveller’s nose, and the nuns of Strasburgh, in the tale of Slaukenbergius. ‘I will touch it, said one; I dare not touch it, said another; I wish I had touched it, said a third; let me touch it, said a fourth.’ While the gentlewomen were debating the point, the traveller with the great nose rode on. It would be no ungracious task to treat of the distresses of the country, if all were distressed alike; but that is not the case; nor is it possible to trace the necessities of one part of the community to their source, or to hint at a remedy, without glancing invidiously at the superfluities of others. ‘Aye, there’s the rub, that makes calamity of so long life.’ The speeches before us are to the subject what a veil is to a lady’s face, or a blind to a window. Almost all that has been said or written upon it is a palpable delusion—an attempt to speak out and say nothing; to oppose something that might be done, and propose something that cannot be done; to direct attention to the subject, and divert it from it; to do something and nothing; and to come to this potent conclusion, that while nothing is done, nothing can be done. ‘But have you then any remedy to propose instead?’ What sort of a remedy do you mean? ‘Oh, one equally safe and efficacious, that shall set every thing to rights, and leave every thing just as it is, that does not touch either the tythes or the national debt, nor places and pensions, nor property of any kind, except the poor’s fund; that you may take from them to make them independent of the rich, as you leave Lord Camden in possession of thirty thousand a year to make him independent of the poor.’—Why, then, what if the Lord Chancellor and the Chancellor of the Exchequer were to play a game at push-pin on the top of St. Paul’s; or if Mr. Brougham and Mr. Horner were to play at cat’s-cradle on the top of the Monument; or if the little garden between the Speaker’s house and the river-side were to be sown with pearls and cockle-shells? Or if——Pshaw! Patience, and shuffle the cards.
The great problem of our great problem-finders appears to be, to take nothing from the rich, and give it to the poor. That will never do. We find them and their schemes of diversion well described in Rabelais, book v. chap. xxii.
‘How Queen Whim’s Officers were employed, and how the said Lady retained us among her Abstractors.
‘I then saw a great number of the Queen’s officers, who made blackamoors white, as fast as hops, just rubbing their bellies with the bottom of a pannier.
‘Others, with three couples of foxes in one yoke, ploughed a sandy shore, and did not lose their seed.
‘Others washed burnt tiles, and made them lose their colour.
‘Others extracted water out of pumice-stones, braying them a good while in a mortar, and changed their substance.
‘Others sheered asses, and thus got long fleece wool.
‘Others gathered off of thorns grapes, and figs off of thistles.