“Political science they had none. * * * Still they went to work politically much as we do. The powerful took all they could get from their subjects and neighbors; and called something or other sacred and glorious when they wanted the people to fight for them. They repressed disaffection by force, when it showed itself in an overt act; but they encouraged freedom of speech, when it was, like Hamlet’s reading, ‘words, words, words.’” In the same story, the episode of the decaying embankment, with its parody of Lord Canning’s Defense of the British Constitution, and the satire on the game laws, set the pace for the subsequent thrusts at Toryism and the country squires, particularly Meredith’s, whom he naturally influenced. Demagogic bamboozlement of the public is punctured again in the speech of Mr. Paperstamp:[290] “We shall make out a very good case; but you must not forget to call the present public distress an awful dispensation; a little pious cant goes a great way towards turning the thoughts of men from the dangerous and Jacobinical propensity of looking into moral and political causes for moral and political effects.” It is in _Melincourt_ also that the campaign of Mr. Oran Hautton in the Borough of Onevote starts the satiric ball rolling into election camps,--later pushed along by the authors of _Pelham_, _The Newcomes_, _Doctor Thome_, _Felix Holt_, _Middlemarch_, and _Beauchamp’s Career_. Although Lytton started out as a Liberal, he ended as a Conservative, and furnishes some counter satire against democracy. In _Night and Morning_ he speaks of men losing their democratic enthusiasm; and in _The Coming Race_ he gives proof that his is entirely lost. The family of the narrator are Americans, “rich and aristocratic, therefore disqualified for public service;” his father, defeated by his tailor in the race for Congress, decides on the superior beauty of private life. The Vrilya have a very expressive compound word. _Koom_ means a profound hollow; _Posh_ is a term of utter contempt; “_Koom-Posh_ is their name for the government of the many, or the ascendency of the most ignorant and hollow.”[291] This contempt, distributed impartially over dishonest demagogue and gullible public, is nothing new. Smollett, for instance, in his _Adventures of an Atom_, appreciates the art of oratory: “Our orator was well acquainted with all the legerdemain of his own language, as well as with the nature of the beast he had to rule. He knew when to distract its weak brain with a tumult of incongruous and contradictory ideas: he knew when to overwhelm its feeble faculty of thinking, by pouring in a torrent of words without any ideas annexed.”