By the kindness and influence of Sir Charles Sterling, Ginx's Baby that night, and long after, found shelter in the Radical Club. He gave rise to a discussion in the smoking-room next evening that ought to be chronicled. Several members of the committee supported his benefactor in urging that the child should be adopted by the Club, as a pledge of their resolve to make the questions of which he seemed to be the embodied emblem subjects of legislative action. Others said that those questions being, in their view, social and not political, were not proper ones to give impulse to a party movement, and that the entertainment in the Club of this foundling would be a gross irregularity: they did not want samples of the material respecting which they were theorizing. To some of the latter Sir Charles had been insisting that, whether they kept the child or not, they could not stifle the questions excited by his condition. “You may delay, but you cannot dissipate them. We are filling up our sessions with party struggles, theoretic discussions, squabbles about foreign politics, debates on political machinery, while year by year the condition of the people is becoming more invidious and full of peril. Social and political reform ought to be linked; the people on whom you confer new political rights cannot enjoy them without health and well-being.” “But all our legislation is directed to that!” exclaimed Mr. Joshua Hale. “Reform, Free Trade, Free Corn--have these not enhanced the wealth of the people?” “Partially; yet there are classes unregenerated by their reviving influences. Free trade cannot insure work, nor can free corn provide food for every citizen.” “Nor any other legislation: let us be practical. I own there is much to be done. I have often stated my 'platform.' We must clip the enormous expenditure on soldiers and ships; reduce our overweening army of diplomatic spies and busybodies; abstain from meddling in everybody's quarrels; redeem from taxation the workman's necessaries--a free breakfast-table; peremptorily legislate against the custom of primogeniture; encourage the distribution and transfer of land; and, under the aegis of the ballot, protect from the tyranny of the landlord and employer their tenants and workmen.” “Very good, perhaps, all of them,” replied Sir Charles, “but some not at the moment possible, and all together are not exhaustive. Why do you not go to the bottom of social needs? You say nothing about Health legislation--are you indifferent to the sanitary condition of the people? You have not hinted at Education--Waste Lands--Emigration--” “Oh! I am opposed to that altogether.”