Page:Eliot - Felix Holt, the Radical, vol. II, 1866.djvu/88

78 employ in my brewery, or anywhere else. I've seen it again and again. If a man takes to tongue-work it's all over with him. 'Everything's wrong,' says he. That's a big text. But does he want to make everything right? Not he. He'd lose his text. 'We want every man's good,' say they. Why, they never knew yet what a man's good is. How should they? It's working for his victual—not getting a slice of other people's."

"Ay, ay," said young Joyce, cordially. "I should just have liked all the delegates in the country mustered for our yeomanry to go into—that's all. They'd see where the strength of Old England lay then. You may tell what it is for a country to trust to trade when it breeds such spindling fellows as those."

"That isn't the fault of trade, my good sir," said Mr Nolan, who was often a little pained by the defects of provincial culture. "Trade, properly conducted, is good for a man's constitution. I could have shown you, in my time, weavers past seventy, with all their faculties as sharp as a pen-knife, doing without spectacles. It's the new system of trade that's to blame: a country can't have too much trade, if it's properly managed. Plenty of sound Tories have made their fortune by trade.