"If"--they will
doubtless think--"the humane Baronet feels so acutely for the Lords
Spiritual and Temporal,--if he has this regard for the convenience of only
658 knights and burgesses,--if, in his enlarged humanity, he can feel for
so helpless a creature as the Earl of COVENTRY, so mild, so unassuming a
prelate as the Bishop of EXETER--if he can sympathise with the wants of
even a D'ISRAELI, and tax his mighty intellect to make even SIBTHORP
comfortable,--surely the same minister will have, aye, a morbid sense of
the wants, the daily wretchedness of hundreds of thousands, who, with the
fiend Corn Law grinning at their fireless hearths--pine and perish in
weavers' hovels, for the which there has as yet been _no_ 'adoption of
measures for the warming and ventilating.'" "Surely"--they will think--"the
man whose sympathy is active for a few of the 'meanest things that live'
will gush with sensibility towards a countless multitude, fluttering into
rags and gaunt with famine. He will go back to first principles; he will,
with a giant's arm, knock down all the conventionalities built by the
selfishness of man--(and what a labourer is selfishness! there was no such
hard worker at the Pyramids or the wall of China)--between him and his
fellow! Hunger will be fed--nakedness will be clothed--and God's image,
though stricken with age, and broken with disease, be acknowledged; not in
the cut-and-dried Pharisaical phrase of trading Church-goers, as a thing
vested with immortality--as a creature fashioned for everlasting
solemnities--but _practically_ treated as of the great family of man--a
brother, invited with the noblest of the Caesars, to an immortal banquet!"
Such may be the hopes of a few, innocent of the knowledge of the
stony-heartedness of Toryism.
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