into a soldier. If the people had not been full of this lust for
combat, it is certain that England must have been overborne. And it
was thought, and is, on the face of it, reasonable, that a struggle
between two indomitable men, with thirty thousand to view it and
three million to discuss it, did help to set a standard of hardihood
and endurance. Brutal it was, no doubt, and its brutality is the
end of it; but it is not so brutal as war, which will survive it.
Whether it is logical now to teach the people to be peaceful in an
age when their very existence may come to depend upon their being
warlike, is a question for wiser heads than mine. But that was what
we thought of it in the days of your grandfathers, and that is why
you might find statesmen and philanthropists like Windham, Fox, and
Althorp at the side of the Ring.

The mere fact that solid men should patronize it was enough in
itself to prevent the villainy which afterwards crept in. For over
twenty years, in the days of Jackson, Brain, Cribb, the Belchers,
Pearce, Gully, and the rest, the leaders of the Ring were men whose
honesty was above suspicion; and those were just the twenty years
when the Ring may, as I have said, have served a national purpose.
You have heard how Pearce saved the Bristol girl from the burning
house, how Jackson won the respect and friendship of the best men of
his age, and how Gully rose to a seat in the first Reformed
Parliament. These were the men who set the standard, and their
trade carried with it this obvious recommendation, that it is one in
which no drunken or foul-living man could long succeed. There were
exceptions among them, no doubt--bullies like Hickman and brutes
like Berks; in the main, I say again that they were honest men,
brave and enduring to an incredible degree, and a credit to the
country which produced them. It was, as you will see, my fate to