When the old people were gone to bed the two young men discussed the matter. “I hope you’ll get in,” said Silverbridge. “And if I can do anything for you of course I will.”
“It is always good to have a real member along with one,” said Tregear.
“But I begin to think I am a very shaky Conservative myself.”
“I am sorry for that.”
“Sir Timothy is such a beast,” said Silverbridge.
“Is that your notion of a political opinion? Are you to be this or that in accordance with your own liking or disliking for some particular man? One is supposed to have opinions of one’s own.”
“Your father would be down on a man because he is a dissenter.”
“Of course my father is old-fashioned.”
“It does seem so hard to me,” said Silverbridge, “to find any difference between the two sets. You who are a true Conservative are much more like to my father, who is a Liberal, than to your own, who is on the same side as yourself.”
“It may be so, and still I may be a good Conservative.”
“It seems to me in the House to mean nothing more than choosing one set of companions or choosing another. There are some awful cads who sit along with Mr. Monk;—fellows that make you sick to hear them, and whom I couldn’t be civil to. But I don’t think there is anybody I hate so much as old Beeswax. He has a contemptuous way with his nose which makes me long to pull it.”
“And you mean to go over in order that you may be justified in doing so. I think I soar a little higher,” said Tregear.
“Oh, of course. You’re a clever fellow,” said Silverbridge, not without a touch of sarcasm.
“A man may soar higher than that without being very clever. If the party that calls itself Liberal were to have all its own way who is there that doesn’t believe that the church would go at once, then all distinction between boroughs, the House of Lords immediately afterwards, and after that the Crown?”
“Those are not my governor’s ideas.”
“Your governor couldn’t help himself. A Liberal party, with plenipotentiary power, must go on right away to the logical conclusion of its arguments. It is only the conservative feeling of the country which saves such men as your father from being carried headlong to ruin by their own machinery. You have read Carlyle’s French Revolution.”
“Yes, I have read that.”
“Wasn’t it so there? There were a lot of honest men who thought they could do a deal of good by making everybody equal. A good many were made equal by having their heads cut off. That’s why I mean to be member for Polpenno and to send Mr. Carbottle back to London. Carbottle probably doesn’t want to cut anybody’s head off.”
“I dare say he’s as conservative as anybody.”
“But he wants to be a member of Parliament; and, as he hasn’t thought much about anything, he is quite willing to lend a hand to communism, radicalism, socialism, chopping people’s heads off, or anything else.”
“That’s all very well,” said Silverbridge, “but where should we have been if there had been no Liberals? Robespierre and his pals cut off a lot of heads, but Louis XIV and Louis XV locked up more in prison.” And so he had the last word in the argument.
The whole of the next morning was spent in canvassing, and the whole of the afternoon. In the evening there was a great meeting at the Polwenning Assembly Room, which at the present moment was in the hands of the Conservative party. Here Frank Tregear made an oration, in which he declared his political convictions. The whole speech was said at the time to be very good; but the portion of it which was apparently esteemed the most, had direct reference to Mr. Carbottle. Who was Mr. Carbottle? Why had he come to Polpenno? Who had sent for him? Why Mr. Carbottle rather than anybody else? Did not the people of Polpenno think that it might be as well to send Mr. Carbottle back to the place from whence he had come? These questions, which seemed to Silverbridge to be as easy as they were attractive, almost made him desirous of making a speech himself.
Then Mr. Williams, the rector, followed, a gentleman who had many staunch friends and many bitter enemies in the town. He addressed himself chiefly to that bane of the whole country—as he conceived them—the godless dissenters; and was felt by Tregear to be injuring the cause by every word he spoke. It was necessary that Mr. Williams should liberate his own mind, and therefore he persevered with the godless dissenters at great length—not explaining, however, how a man who thought enough about his religion to be a dissenter could be godless, or how a godless man should care enough about religion to be a dissenter.
Mr. Williams was heard with impatience, and then there was a clamour for the young lord. He was the son of an ex-Prime Minister, and therefore of course he could speak. He was himself a member of Parliament, and therefore could speak. He had boldly severed himself from the faulty political tenets of his family, and therefore on such an occasion as this was peculiarly entitled to speak. When a man goes electioneering, he must speak. At a dinner-table to refuse is possible:—or in any assembly convened for a semiprivate purpose, a gentleman may declare that he is not prepared for the occasion. But in such an emergency as this, a man—and a member of Parliament—cannot plead that he is not prepared. A son of a former Prime Minister who had already taken so strong
