Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/117



HE results of the general election of 1874 were surprising in many respects, and to many persons, but probably to none more so than Mr. Thomas Burt, M.P. While other prospective legislators were studying or wassailing at Oxford and Cambridge, the honorable member for Morpeth was laboriously ransacking the bowels of the earth in grimy Northumberland for coals wherewith to supply the complex wants of the British public. Like Goldsmith's village preacher, "he ne'er had changed, nor wished to change, his place;" and, when his fellows first advised him of their intention to bring him forward as a candidate for parliamentary honors, he replied in the words of the anti-Utopian, —

But elected he was to take his seat among his "betters"—among lordlings and millionnaires—in the choicest of West-end metropolitan clubs, and that, too, with an ease which contrasted sharply with the ill success in other constituencies of more widely known "labor candidates." 103