"The rogues, lad, the rogues! Rogues and noodles make up the blessed lot of senators sitting in your gimcrack palace, who vote away your birthright and mine, tax the sweat of millions, bow to Gold Stick and kiss Black Rod's coat-tails, send our fleets to defend Von Sourkraut's honour, or our soldiers to sicken of jungle fever in pursuit of the rebel Lollum Dha's adversaries! Parliament? Representatives of the people? Very much! My gallant friend, all pipeclay and padded breast, who won't hear of the army estimates being reduced; my learned friend, who brings all his forensic skill and all his power of tongue-fence, first learned in three-guinea briefs at the Old Bailey, and now educated up into such silvery eloquence, into play for the chance of a judgeship and a knighthood; the volatile Irish member, who subsides finally into the consulate of Zanzibar; the honourable member, who, having in his early youth swept out a shop at Loughboro', and arrived in London with eightpence, has accumulated millions, and is, of course, a strong Tory, with but two desires in life--to keep down 'the people,' and to obtain a card for his wife for the Premier's Saturday evenings--these are the representatives of the people for you! Rogues and noodles, noodles and rogues. Don't you like the picture?" "I should hate it, if I believed in it, Mr. Byrne!" said Joyce, moving away, "but I don't! You won't think me rude or unkind, but--but I've been brought up in so widely different a faith. I've been taught to hold in such reverence all that I hear you deny, that----" "Stick to it, lad! hold to it while you can!" said the old man kindly, laying his hand on his companion's arm. "My doctrines are strong meat for babes--too strong, I dare say--and you're but a toothless infant yet in these things, anyhow! So much the better for you. I recollect a story of some man who said he was never happy or well after he was told he had a liver! Go on as long as you can in pleasant ignorance of the fact that you have a political liver. Some day it will become torpid and sluggish, and then--then come and talk to old Dr. Byrne. Till then, he won't attempt to alarm you, depend upon it!" Not very long to be deferred was the day in which the political patient was to come to the political physician for advice and for treatment.