Page:History of the Anti corn law league - Volume 2.pdf/59

 that? It is old, say you? Yes, and the hotter haste ought you, of all others, to be in to let it grow no older! If but the faintest whisper in your hearts intimate to you that it is not fair,—hasten, for the sake of Conservatism itself, to probe it vigorously, to cast it forth at once, and for ever, if guilty, How will or can you preserve it? The thing is not fair? 'Impossible,' a thousandfold is marked on that. And ye call yourselves Conservatives, Aristocracies. Ought not honour and nobleness of mind, if they had departed from all the earth elsewhere, to find their last refuge with you? Ye unfortunate!

"The bough that is dead shall be cut away, for the sake of the tree itself. Old? yes, it is too old. Many a weary winter has it swung and creaked there, and knawed and fretted, with its dead wood, the organ in substance and still living fibre of this good tree; many a long summer has its ugly naked brown defaced the fair green umbrage; every day it has done mischief, and that only: off with it, for the tree's sake, if for nothing more; lot the Conservatism that would preserve, cut it away. Did no wood forester apprise you that a dead bough, with its dead root striking there is extraneous, poisonous; is as a dead iron spike, some horrid rust ploughshare driven into the living substance;—nay, is far worse; for in every windstorm ('commercial crisis' or the like), it frets and creaks, jolts itself to and fro, and cannot be quiet your dead iron spike would! If I were the Conservative Party of England (which is another bold figure of speech), I would not for a hundred thousand pounds an hour allow those Corn Laws to continue. All Potosi and Golconda put together would not purchase my assent to them. Do you count what treasuries of bitter indignation they are laying up for you in every just English heart? Do you know what questions, not as Corn-prices and Sliding scales alone, they are forcing every reflective Englishman to ask himself? Questions insoluble or hitherto unsolved; deeper than any of our Logic-