reconcile them. I wish to avoid placing in opposition those two
words--Aristocracy and People. I am one who can believe in the
virtues and uses of both, and would not on any account deprive
either of a single just right belonging to it. I will use, instead
of these words, the terms, the governors and the governed. These
two bodies the Association finds with a gulf between them, in which
are lying, newly-buried, thousands on thousands of the bravest and
most devoted men that even England ever bred. It is to prevent the
recurrence of innumerable smaller evils, of which, unchecked, that
great calamity was the crowning height and the necessary
consummation, and to bring together those two fronts looking now so
strangely at each other, that this Association seeks to help to
bridge over that abyss, with a structure founded on common justice
and supported by common sense. Setting class against class! That
is the very parrot prattle that we have so long heard. Try its
justice by the following example:- A respectable gentleman had a
large establishment, and a great number of servants, who were good
for nothing, who, when he asked them to give his children bread,
gave them stones; who, when they were told to give those children
fish, gave them serpents. When they were ordered to send to the
East, they sent to the West; when they ought to have been serving
dinner in the North, they were consulting exploded cookery books in
the South; who wasted, destroyed, tumbled over one another when
required to do anything, and were bringing everything to ruin. At
last the respectable gentleman calls his house steward, and says,
even then more in sorrow than in anger, "This is a terrible
business; no fortune can stand it--no mortal equanimity can bear
it! I must change my system; I must obtain servants who will do
their duty." The house steward throws up his eyes in pious horror,
ejaculates "Good God, master, you are setting class against class!"