Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/191

 the English aristocracy, too, there might come a day of reckoning. They were like the horse-leech which had swallowed more blood than was good for it, and its health required that its tail should be dipped in salt. "And," says the writer above quoted, "they may think themselves well off, that this is all. They will have their tails salted yet, they may depend upon it; as certainly as the manufacturers would, if they had been all this time laying a duty on home-grown corn."

The landlord class, including simple squires as well as the titled nobility, in its relation to the trading and professional classes, somewhat resembled the French noblesse before the Revolution in its relation to the bourgeoisie. For more than the first quarter of the nineteenth century, even the members of the House of Commons were regarded by the upper portion of the landlord class somewhat as the doorkeeper of the House of Lords regarded them in the beginning of the seventeenth century, shutting the door in their faces with the words, "Good man burgess, you come not here." The wives of men who would sit in the House of Lords on the death of their fathers, have been heard to say that the men in question would then —that is, when they sat in the House of Lords—be among gentlemen. If circumstances had