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HEREDITARY PREJUDICES.
the counties for the benefit of politicians, or will you come forward honestly and fairly to inquire into this question? Why, I cannot believe that the gentry of England will be made mere drumheads to be sounded upon by others to give forth unmeaning and empty sounds, and to have no articulate voice of their own. ('Hear, hear,' and cheers.) No. You are the gentry of England who represent the counties. You are the aristocracy of England. Your fathers led our fathers: you may lead us, if you go the right way. But, although you have retained your influence with this country longer than any other aristocracy, it has not been by opposing popular opinion, or by setting yourselves against the spirit of the age. In other days, when the battle and the hunting-fields were the tests of manly vigour, why, your fathers were first and foremost there. The aristocracy of England were not like the aristocracy of France, the mere minions of a court; nor were they like the hidalgos of Madrid, who dwindled into pigmies. You have been Englishmen. You have not shown a want of courage and firmness when any call has been made upon you. This is a new era. It is the age of improvement, it is the age of social advancement, not the age for war or for feudal sports. You live in a mercantile age, when the whole wealth of the world is poured into your lap. You cannot have the advantage of commercial rents and feudal privileges (hear, hear); but you may be what you always have been if you will identify yourselves with the spirit of the age. The English people look to the gentry and aristocracy of their country as their leaders. (Hear, hear.) I, who am not one of you, have no hesitation in telling you, that there is a deep-rooted, a hereditary prejudice, if I may so call in your favour in this country. But you never got it, and you will not keep it, by obstructing the spirit of the age. If you are indifferent to enlightened means of finding employment for your own peasantry; if you are found obstructing that advance which is calculated to knit nations more together in the bonds of peace by means of commercial intercourse; if you are found fighting against the discoveries which have almost given breath and life to material nature, and setting up yourselves as obstructives of that which the community at large has decreed shall go on, why, then, you will be the gentry of England no longer, and others will be found to take your place. (Hear, hear.) And I have no hesitation in saying that you stand just now in a very critical position. There is a wide spread suspicion that you have been tampering with the best feelings and with the honest confidence of your own country in this cause. Everywhere you are doubted and suspected. Read your own organs, and you will see that this is the case. (Hear, hear.) Well, now is the time to show that you are not the mere party politicians which you are said to be. I have said that we shall be opposed in this measure by politicians; they do not want
