And Lenny did not wholly escape from the mephitic portions of the motley
elements from which his awakening mind drew its nurture. Think not it
was all pure oxygen that the panting lip drew in. No; there were still
those inflammatory tracts. Political I do not like to call them, for
politics means the art of government, and the tracts I speak of assailed
all government which mankind has hitherto recognized. Sad rubbish,
perhaps, were such tracts to you, O sound thinker, in your easy-chair!
or to you, practised statesman, at your post on the Treasury Bench; to
you, calm dignitary of a learned Church; or to you, my lord judge, who
may often have sent from your bar to the dire Orcus of Norfolk's Isle the
ghosts of men whom that rubbish, falling simultaneously on the bumps of
acquisitiveness and combativeness, hath untimely slain! Sad rubbish to
you! But seems it such rubbish to the poor man, to whom it promises a
paradise on the easy terms of upsetting a world? For, ye see, those
"Appeals to Operatives" represent that same world-upsetting as the
simplest thing imaginable,--a sort of two-and-two-make-four proposition.
The poor have only got to set their strong hands to the axle, and heave-
a-boy! and hurrah for the topsy-turvy! Then just to put a little
wholesome rage into the heave-a-hoy! it is so facile to accompany the
eloquence of "Appeals" with a kind of stir-the-bile-up statistics,--
"Abuses of the aristocracy," "Jobs of the Priesthood," "Expenses of the
Army kept up for Peers' younger sons," "Wars contracted for the villanous
purpose of raising the rents of the landowners,"--all arithmetically
dished up, and seasoned with tales of every gentleman who has committed a
misdeed, every clergyman who has dishonoured his cloth; as if such
instances were fair specimens of average gentlemen and ministers of
religion! All this, passionately advanced (and, observe, never answered,
for that literature admits no controversialists, and the writer has it
all his own way), may be rubbish; but it is out of such rubbish that
operatives build barricades for attack, and legislators prisons for