prize that remains to recompense the toils of office. You will neither do good nor win credit. Much too deeply is the thought of your ultimate purposes rooted in the minds of the landed monopolists for either forgiveness or forgetfulness to enter there. Years will not eradicate their suspicion. It will outlive your power, and he planted on your grave.
"A better time? What can bring it? The whig leaders are still too infatuated to pre-occupy the ground. With that renowned ingenuity which builds a wall to knock their heads against, they hold themselves pledged to their fixed duty, and you unpledged as the free air. They stick to their stand by the wayside, where you may pass on and welcome. As to them, delay only provides against you the chance of their having a lucid interval. The chance may be remote; it is not an absolute impossibility.
"You have brought in a bill so lately—Psha! Sir Robert; you are too much of a man to mind that. It is a good deal longer since the enactment of your bill than that enactment was from the time of your declaration against any change. Besides, how stands your bill as to the different parties interested?
"To the agriculturists, who reckoned upon its keeping up the price of wheat to 56s. the quarter, it is a complete failure. Nothing has been kept up but rents, unless it be agitation. At meetings of protection societies, the farm tenantry are declared to be posting rapidly on the road to ruin. Do not think of reading your history in their eyes, or hearing it from their lips. You can lose no popularity at their meetings. Even with the landlords, your law is a forlorn hope. They merely think,
'Better to bear the ills [or bills] we have,
Than fly to others which we know not of.'
You have no clinging attachment on their parts to overcome. They are in no state to offer stout resistance to a bold onset. Moreover, can they govern the country? Were they to turn you out, there is only one other thing in the wide world which they could do, and that is, to let you in again.
"Wheat at 45s. is a good repeal price. No great shock would be given by the change. It would simply render more clear what people were to do. Any great fall or rise will breed confusion and entanglement; desolation in the south or commotion in the north. It is a price to take advantage of for action, as you would the conversion of a stock in the funds. The moment is a golden one. Old Time bends his brow for the forelock to be seized. There is utter destruction to the small farmers, in the perspective one way; and in the other, the well-remembered horrors of Paisley, with many a scene of kindred misery.
"Although the cheapness resulting from abundant harvests has