Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/564

134 system. The section would bear in mind that one of the homœopathic doctrines was, that infinitesimal doses of any medicine which would occasion the disease under which the patient labored, supposing him to be in a healthy state, would cure it. Now it was a remarkable circumstance—proved in the evidence—that the diseased Thom employed a woman to follow him about all day with a pail of water, assuring her that one drop, a purely homœopathic remedy, the section would observe, placed upon his tongue after death, would restore him. What was the obvious inference? That Thom, who was marching and countermarching in osier beds, and other swampy places, was impressed with a presentiment that he should be drowned; in which case, had his instructions been complied with, he could not fail to have been brought to life again instantly by his own prescriptions. As it was, if this woman, or any other person, had administered an infinitesimal dose of lead and gunpowder, immediately after he fell, he would have recovered forthwith. But unhappily the woman concerned did not possess the power of reasoning by analogy, or carrying out a principal, and thus the unfortunate gentleman had been sacrificed to the ignorance of the peasantry.

"Mr. Kwakley stated the result of some most ingenious statistical inquiries relative to the difference between the value of the qualification of several members of parliament, as published to the world, and its real nature and amount. After reminding the section that every member of parliament for a town or borough was supposed to possess a clear freehold estate of three hundred pounds per annum, the honorable gentleman excited great amusement and laughter by stating the exact amount of free-hold property possessed by a column of legislators, in which he had included himself. It appeared from this table that the amount of such income possessed by each was pounds, shillings, and pence, yielding an average of the same. (Great laughter.) It was pretty well