Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, September 25, 1841Various
General
Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, September 25, 1841
Various
English wit and humor -- Periodicals
The speech of Sir ROBERT PEEL was a pithy illustration of the good old
Tory creed. He opens his oration with a benevolent and patriotic yearning
for the comforts of Parliamentary warmth and ventilation. He moves for
papers connected with "the building of the two houses of Parliament, and
with the adoption of measures for _warming and ventilating_ those houses!"
The whole policy of the Tories has ever exemplified their love of nice
warm places; though, certainly, they have not been very great sticklers
for atmospheric purity. Indeed, like certain other labourers, who work by
night, they have toiled in the foulest air,--have profited by the most
noisome labour. When Lord JOHN RUSSELL introduced that imperfect mode of
ventilation, the Reform Bill, into the house, had he provided for a full
and pure supply of public opinion,--had he ventilated the Commons by a
more extended franchise,--Sir ROBERT PEEL would not, as minister, have
shown such magnanimous concern for the creature comforts of Members of
Parliament--he might, indeed, have still displayed his undying love of a
warm place; but he would not have enjoyed it on the bench of the Treasury.
As for ventilation, why, the creature Toryism, like a frog, could live in
the heart of a tree;--it being always provided that the tree should bear
golden pippins.
We can, however, imagine that this solicitude of Sir ROBERT for the ease
and comfort of the legislative Magi may operate to his advantage in the
minds of certain honest folk, touched by the humanity which sheds so sweet
a light upon the opening oration of the new minister. "If"--they will
doubtless think--"the humane Baronet feels so acutely for the Lords
Spiritual and Temporal,--if he has this regard for the convenience of only
658 knights and burgesses,--if, in his enlarged humanity, he can feel for
so helpless a creature as the Earl of COVENTRY, so mild, so unassuming a
prelate as the Bishop of EXETER--if he can sympathise with the wants of
even a D'ISRAELI, and tax his mighty intellect to make even SIBTHORP
comfortable,--surely the same minister will have, aye, a morbid sense of
the wants, the daily wretchedness of hundreds of thousands, who, with the
fiend Corn Law grinning at their fireless hearths--pine and perish in
weavers' hovels, for the which there has as yet been _no_ 'adoption of
measures for the warming and ventilating.'" "Surely"--they will think--"the
man whose sympathy is active for a few of the 'meanest things that live'
will gush with sensibility towards a countless multitude, fluttering into
rags and gaunt with famine. He will go back to first principles; he will,
with a giant's arm, knock down all the conventionalities built by the
selfishness of man--(and what a labourer is selfishness! there was no such
hard worker at the Pyramids or the wall of China)--between him and his
fellow! Hunger will be fed--nakedness will be clothed--and God's image,
though stricken with age, and broken with disease, be acknowledged; not in
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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