Great Britain -- Description and travel; Great Britain -- Rural conditions
The _highest quarters_, and the infamous London press, will,
at any rate, be prettily exposed, before Christmas. Old Sir Thomas
Lethbridge, too, and Gaffer Gooch, and his base tribe of Pittites at
Ipswich; Coke and Suffield, and their crew; all these will be prettily
laughed at; nor will that "tall soul," Lord Milton, escape being
reminded of his profound and patriotic observation relative to "this
self-renovating country." No sooner did he see the wheat get up to sixty
or seventy shillings than he lost all his alarms; found that all things
were right, turned his back on Yorkshire Reformers, and went and toiled
for Scarlett at Peterborough: and discovered, that there was nothing
wrong, at last, and that the "self-renovating country" would triumph
over all its difficulties!--So it will, "tall soul;" it will triumph
over all its difficulties; it will renovate itself; it will purge itself
of rotten boroughs, of vile borough-mongers, their tools and their
stopgaps; it will purge itself of all the villanies which now corrode
its heart; it will, in short, free itself from those curses, which the
expenditure of eight or nine hundred millions of English money took
place in order to make perpetual: it will, in short, become free from
oppression, as easy and as happy as the gallant and sensible nation on
the other side of the Channel. This is the sort of renovation, but not
renovation by the means of wheat at seventy shillings a quarter.
Renovation it will have: it will rouse and will shake from itself curses
like the pension which is paid to Burke's executors. This is the sort of
renovation, "tall soul;" and not wheat at 70_s._ a quarter, while it is
at twenty-five shillings a quarter in France. Pray observe, reader, how
the "tall soul" _catched_ at the rise in the price of wheat: how he
_snapped_ at it: how quickly he ceased his attacks upon the Whitehall
people and upon the System. He thought he had been deceived: he thought
that things were coming about again; and so he drew in his horns, and
began to talk about the self-renovating country. This was the tone of
them _all_. This was the tone of all the borough-mongers; all the
friends of the System; all those, who, like Lethbridge, had begun to be
staggered. They had deviated, for a moment, into our path! but they
popped back again the moment they saw the price of wheat rise! All the
enemies of Reform, all the calumniators of Reformers, all the friends of
the System, most anxiously desired a rise in the price of wheat. Mark
the curious fact, that all the vile press of London; the whole of that
infamous press; that newspapers, magazines, reviews: the whole of the
base thing; and a baser surely this world never saw; that the whole of
this base thing rejoiced, exulted, crowed over me, and told an impudent
lie, in order to have the crowing; crowed, for what? _Because wheat and
bread were become dear!_ A newspaper hatched under a corrupt Priest, a
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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