‘Boy, boy!’ said Vavasour, who could endure raillery from one he had been at college with, but who was not over-pleased at Coningsby selecting the present occasion to claim his franchise, when a new man was present like Lord Montacute, on whom Vavasour naturally wished to produce an impression. It must be owned that it was not, as they say, very good taste in the husband of Edith, but prosperity had developed in Coningsby a native vein of sauciness which it required all the solemnity of the senate to repress. Indeed, even there, upon the benches, with a grave face, he often indulged in quips and cranks that convulsed his neighbouring audience, who often, amid the long dreary nights of statistical imposture, sought refuge in his gay sarcasms, his airy personalities, and happy quotations. ‘I do not see how there can be opinion without thought,’ said Tancred; ‘and I do not believe the public ever think. How can they? They have no time. Certainly we live at present under the empire of general ideas, which are extremely powerful. But the public have not invented those ideas. They have adopted them from convenience. No one has confidence in himself; on the contrary, every one has a mean idea of his own strength and has no reliance on his own judgment. Men obey a general impulse, they bow before an external necessity, whether for resistance or action. Individuality is dead; there is a want of inward and personal energy in man; and that is what people feel and mean when they go about complaining there is no faith.’ ‘You would hold, then,’ said Henry Sydney, ‘that the progress of public liberty marches with the decay of personal greatness?’ ‘It would seem so.’ ‘But the majority will always prefer public liberty to personal greatness,’ said Lord Marney. ‘But, without personal greatness, you never would have had public liberty,’ said Coningsby. ‘After all, it is civilisation that you are kicking against,’ said Vavasour. ‘I do not understand what you mean by civilisation,’ said Tancred. ‘The progressive development of the faculties of man,’ said Vavasour.