Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/69



to the very steps of the throne. For that the ostensible instruments are not the substantial ones is matter of public evidence and notoriety. And this is your freedom of election.

"But the inference I want to draw from the exposure of this falsehood is the practical inutility, in the existing state of the laws, of you or me or anybody attempting to arrive at political amelioration through the instrumentality of the House of Commons. Calculate, for example, how much the money and trouble which has been extracted from you and from me in the present attempt to obtain one vote in the House of Commons would have effected if applied in the way which was our natural channel,—the raising of that 'pressure from without' which is daily recommended to us by the terrors of our opponents. I do not advise you hastily to lay aside altogether the pursuit of improvement by the first and feeble mode, but I do advise you to make it entirely subordinate to that more politic and useful mode in which your natural strength lies, and to give no effort to the one, except what you have not the means or opportunity of applying to the other.

"It is scarcely necessary for me to say that the power lodged in a Committee of finding a petition 'frivolous and vexatious,' is no security against the recurrence of a case like ours. We had the option of expending perhaps ten thousand pounds more, for the chance that the Committee would give us a claim on, it may be, half that sum lodged as security.