when proper forethought, diligence, and sacrifice would have made
the building fireproof.


III.--A thorough-paced Reformer--if not a Revolutionary.

By the kindness and influence of Sir Charles Sterling, Ginx's
Baby that night, and long after, found shelter in the Radical
Club. He gave rise to a discussion in the smoking-room next
evening that ought to be chronicled. Several members of the
committee supported his benefactor in urging that the child
should be adopted by the Club, as a pledge of their resolve to
make the questions of which he seemed to be the embodied emblem
subjects of legislative action. Others said that those questions
being, in their view, social and not political, were not proper
ones to give impulse to a party movement, and that the
entertainment in the Club of this foundling would be a gross
irregularity: they did not want samples of the material
respecting which they were theorizing. To some of the latter Sir
Charles had been insisting that, whether they kept the child or
not, they could not stifle the questions excited by his
condition.

"You may delay, but you cannot dissipate them. We are filling up
our sessions with party struggles, theoretic discussions,
squabbles about foreign politics, debates on political machinery,
while year by year the condition of the people is becoming more
invidious and full of peril. Social and political reform ought
to be linked; the people on whom you confer new political rights
cannot enjoy them without health and well-being."