'I am told a working man has now a pair of cotton stockings, and that Henry VIII. himself was not as well off.... I deny the premisses. I deny that the condition of the main body is better now than at any other period of our history--that it is as good as it has been at several. The people were better clothed, better lodged, and better fed just before the Wars of the Roses than they are at this moment. The Acts of Parliament, from the Plantagenets to the Tudors, teach us alike the prices of provisions and the rate of wages.' 'And are these the people?' the hero of the story asks himself, after such conversations. 'If so, I would I lived more among them. Compared with this converse, the tattle of our saloons has in it something humiliating. It is not merely that it is deficient in warmth and depth and breadth; that it is always discussing persons instead of principles; choking its want of thought in mimetic dogmas, and its want of feeling in superficial raillery. It is not merely that it has neither imagination, nor fancy, nor sentiment, nor knowledge to recommend it, but it appears to me, even as regards manners and expressions, inferior in refinement and phraseology, trivial, uninteresting, stupid, really vulgar.' The tattle of politics was no better than the tattle of the saloons. Disraeli's experience in the northern towns had shown him what a problem lay before any Government of England which deserved the name. The Reform Bill was now twelve years old, and political liberty, so far, had not touched the outside of the disease. London, with its cliques and parties, its balls and festivities, seemed but an iridescent scum over an abyss of seething wretchedness. Here was work for rulers, if ruling was ever again to mean more than intrigue for office and manipulation of votes. Devilsdusts by thousands were generating in the vapour of Free Trade industry, while the Tadpoles and the Tapers, the wirepullers of the House of Commons, were in a fever of agitation whether the Great Bedchamber question was to bring back the Melbourne Ministry, or whether Peel was to have his way. _Tadpole_: The malcontent Liberals who have turned them out are not going to bring them in again. That makes us equal. Then we have an important section to work upon, the Sneaks, the men who are afraid of a dissolution. I will be bound we make a good working Conservative majority of twenty-five out of the Sneaks. _Taper_: With the Treasury patronage, fears and favours combined, and all the places we refuse our own men, we may count on the Sneaks. _Tadpole_: There are several religious men who have wanted an excuse for a long time to rat. We must get Sir Robert to make some kind of a religious move, and that will secure Sir Litany Lax and young Mr. Salem.