And he flung out, his retreat hampered and made humiliating by the entrance of the pupils, who, marshalled by the round-eyed one, and all round-eyed themselves, blocked the doorway at that unlucky moment. He broke through them without ceremony, though they represented the most respectable families in Bristol, and with his head bent he strode wrathfully across the Square.
To be turned out of a girls' boarding-school! To be shown the door like some wretched philandering schoolboy, or a subaltern in his first folly! He, the man of the world, of experience, of ambition! The man with a career! He was furious.
"The little cat!" he cried as he went. "I wish I had never seen her face! What a fool, what a fool I was to come!"
Unheroic words and an unheroic mood. But though there were heroes before Agamemnon, it is not certain that there were any after George the Fourth. At any rate, any who, like that great man, were heroic always and in all circumstances.
Probably Vaughan would have forgiven the little cat had he known that she was at that moment weeping very bitterly, with her face plunged into the pillow of her not over-luxurious bed. For she was young, and a woman. And because, in her position, the name of love was taboo; because to her the admiring look, which to a more fortunate sister was homage, was an insult; because the petits soins, the flower, the note, the trifle that to another were more precious than jewels, were not for her, it did not follow that she was not flesh and blood, that she had not feeling, affection, passion. True, the pang was soon deadened, for habit is strong. True, the bitter tears were soon dried, for employers like not gloomy looks. True, she soon cried shame on her own discontent, for she was good as gold. And yet to be debarred, in the tender springtime, from the sweet scents, the budding blooms, the gay carols, to have but one April coach-ride in a desert of days, is hard-is very hard. Mary Smith, weeping on her hopeless pillow-not without thought of the cruel arch stooping to crush her, the cruel fate from which he had snatched her, not without thought of her own ingratitude, her black ingratitude-felt that it was hard, very hard.
IX
THE BILL FOR GIVING EVERYBODYEVERYTHING!
It is difficult to describe and impossible to exaggerate the heat of public feeling which preceded the elections of '31. Four-fifths of the people of this country believed that the Bill-from which they expected so much that a satirist has aptly given it the title at the head of this chapter-had been defeated in the late House by a trick. That trick the King, God bless him, had punished by dissolving the House. It remained for the people to show their sense of the trick by returning a very different House; such a House as would not only pass the Bill, but pass it by a majority so decisive that the Lords, and particularly the Bench of Bishops, whose hostility was known, would not dare to oppose the public will.
But as no more than a small proportion of these four-fifths had votes, they were forced to act, if they would make their will obeyed, indirectly; in one place by the legitimate pressure of public opinion, in another by bribery, in a third by intimidation, in a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth by open violence; everywhere by the unspoken threat of revolution. And hence arose the one good, sound, and firm argument against the Bill which the Tory party enjoyed.
One or two of their other arguments are not without interest, if only as the defence set up for a system so anomalous as to seem to us incredible-a system under which Gatton, with no inhabitants, returned two members, and Sheffield, with something like a hundred thousand inhabitants, returned none; under which Dunwich, long drowned under the North Sea, returned two members, and Birmingham returned none; under which the City of London returned four and Lord Lonsdale returned nine; under which Cornwall, with one-fourth of the population of Lancashire, returned thrice as many representatives; under which the South vastly outweighed the North, and land mightily outweighed all other property.
Moreover, in no two boroughs was the franchise the same. One man lived in a hovel and had a vote; his neighbour lived in a mansion and had no vote. Frequently the whole of the well-to-do townsfolk were voteless. Then, while any man with five thousand pounds might buy a seat, nor see the face of a single elector, on the other hand, the poll might be kept open for fifteen days, and a single county election might cost two hundred thousand pounds. Bribery, forbidden in theory, was permitted in practice. The very Government bribed under the rose, and it was humorously said that all that a man's constituents required was to be satisfied of the impurity of his intentions!
An anomalous system; yet its defenders had something to say for it.
First, that narrow as the franchise seemed, every class found somewhere in England its mouthpiece. At Preston, where all could vote who slept in the borough the previous night, the poorest class; in the potwalloping boroughs where a fireplace gave a vote, the next class; in a city like Westminster, the ratepayers; in the counties, the freeholders; in the universities, the clergy. And so on, the argument being that the very anomalies of the system provided a mixed representation without giving the masses a preponderant voice.
Secondly, they said that it insured a House of ability, by enabling young men of parts, but small means, to obtain seats. Those who put this forward flourished a long list of statesmen who had come in for nomination boroughs. It began with Pitt and ended with Macaulay-a feather plucked from the enemy's wing; and Burke stood for much in it. It became one of the commonplaces of the struggle.
The third contention was of greater weight. It was that, with all its abuses, the old system had worked well. This argument, too, had its commonplace. The proverb, stare super antiquas vias, was thundered from a thousand platforms, coupled with copious references to the French wars, and to the pilot who had weathered the storm. This was the argument of the old, and the rich, and the timid-of those who clung to top-boots in the daytime and to pantaloons in the evening. But as the struggle progressed it came to be merged in the one sound argument to which reference has been made.
"If you do not pass the Bill," said the Whigs, "there will be a revolution."
"Possibly," the Tories rejoined. "And whom have we to thank for that? Who, using the French Revolution of last July as a fulcrum, have unsettled the whole country? And now, having disturbed everything, tell us that we must grant to force what is not due to reason? You! But if the Bill is to pass, not because it is a good Bill, but because the mob desire it, where will this end? Pass Bills out of fear, and where will you end? Presently there will arise a ranting adventurer, more violent than Brougham, a hoary schemer more unscrupulous than Grey, an angry boy, outscolding Durham, a pedant more bloodless than Lord John, an honest fanatic blinder than Althorp! And when they threaten you with the terrors of the mob, what will you say?"
To which the Whigs could only reply that the people must be trusted; and-and that the Bill must pass, or not only coronets but crowns would be flying.
Dry arguments nowadays; but in those days alive, and to the party on its defence-the party which found itself thrust against the wall, that its pockets might be emptied-of vital interest. From scores of platforms candidates, leaning forward, bland and smiling, with one hand under the coat-tails and the other gently pumping, pumping, pumping, enunciated them-old hands these; or, red in the face, thundered them, striking fist into palm and overawing opposition; or, hopeless amid the rain of dead cats and stale eggs, muttered them in a reporter's ear, since the hootings of the crowd made other utterance impossible. But ever as the contest went on, the smiling candidate grew rarer; for day by day the Tories, seeing their cause hopeless, seeing even Whigs, such as Sir Thomas Acland in Devonshire and Mr. Wilson Patten in Lancashire, cast out if they were lukewarm, grew more desperate, cried more loudly on high heaven, asserted more frantically that justice was dead on the earth. All this, while those who believed that the Bill was going to give everything to everybody pushed their advantage without mercy. Many a borough which had not known a contest for a generation, many a county, was fought and captured. No Tory felt safe; no bargain, though signed and sealed, held good; no patron, though he had held his income from his borough as secure as any part of his property, could say that his voters would dare to go to the poll.
This last was the apprehension in the mind of Isaac White, Sir Robert Vermuyden's