J. Ewing Ritchie

“ Wealthy men, and busy men, and great men, don’t stand talking and grimacing for nothing; and when I catch one member in a corner with Brown I am not greenhorn enough to suppose that they are merely inquiring after each other’s health, or commenting on the extraordinary mildness of the season, and its probable effect on the growth of cabbages. No, no, you may be certain that the Lobby of the House of Commons, where I have seen our greatest statesmen, our proudest peers, the nation’s most illustrious guests, ambassadors, and princes, and wags, is not the place for small talk. ”

“ A grander sight of its kind is perhaps hardly to be seen. For twelve months have the public been preparing for the event. For twelve months has the sporting and the betting world been on the qui vive. We do not bet, for we hold that the custom is absurd in a rich man, and wicked in one who is not so; but in every street in London, in every town in England, in many a quiet village, at the beer-shop, or the gin-palace, or the public-house, bets have been made, and thousands and thousands of pounds are depending on the event. As the time draws nigh the excitement increases. ”

“ Every merchant or employer of labour has the power of instant dismissal; but in Government offices this great check on idleness and stupidity is ignored. Officials are happy fellows. The ills of life do not affect them. Mills may stop, panics may take place, commerce may decline, ships may rot in deserted harbours; docks and warehouses, once teeming with busy life, may be silent as the grave—but their income knows no change, save when death causes a general promotion in their ranks. The agricultural mind may be weighed down with grief—it may find its idols but clay. ”

“ Opposite to the supper-room is a lofty orchestra, glittering all over with many coloured lamps; further on and behind are walks, and trees, and a fountain, with gigantic horses snorting water through their nostrils, and a space for fireworks, the demand for which on the part of the pleasure seekers of the metropolis, if we may judge by the supply, is insatiable. Let us not forget also the Rotunda, a large building with pit, boxes, and gallery, chiefly devoted to horsemanship, neither worse nor better than what is usually seen at such places. The comic singing is a feature of the place. ”

“ We all say the peers must give way to the Commons; and yet we all know that half the latter are returned by the former, and that you can no more succeed in contesting a county against its lords and landlords, than you can hope to fly in the air, or to walk on the sea. Hear a pot-house orator on the House of Peers, you would think it the most indefensible establishment imaginable. But is it so? Ask Exeter Hall; that truly British institution is in raptures with the whole British peerage. ”

“ Nor is this the only sign; our sterling writers—the classics of our land—are all published in a cheap form, so as to suit the pockets of the people. The literature of the rail even is not so very bad after all. Much of it is light and superficial, undoubtedly; nor is this to be wondered at: the traveller must have something light, or he cannot read at all. The book that requires thought is not for the rail, but the quiet study. Your grave scholars, your most painful divines, now and then put by the dictionary or the commentary, and read, it may be, the Times. ”

“ What a change has come over the House! No more chatting and laughing of members on empty benches—no more idling of reporters—no more indifference in the strangers’ gallery. Even the divine voices of the women are hushed, and they stop to pay the homage beauty should ever love to pay to intellect and strength. What a grand sound is that cheer bursting from five hundred throats—for the house is hearty in its approval of a good speech, on whatever side it be delivered ”

“ You are puzzled to know what manner of men you are amongst. They are not strangers fresh from the country—they have too pale and town-like a look for that; they are not members—because members feast in another part of the house. You will soon see what they are! you leave that room and enter another, in which are a few well-dressed personages transcribing hurriedly, as if for life. The truth flashes upon you. “These men are the reporters,” you exclaim. For once, my good sir, you are right; and if you go through that glass-door you will find yourself in the Reporters’ Gallery. ”

“ Oxford sends there its trained and scholarly churchmanship, and the manufacturing towns their vigorous dissent. Lowness of birth is no obstacle to success. Lindsay was a cabin-boy; Fox, a weaver in Norwich in his youth; poor Brotherton, a factory lad; Ingram cleaned the shoes of one of his constituents; yet the House gives these men as ready a hearing as it awards to the inheritors of broad domains and the most illustrious of historic names. If the House is flunkeyfied, conventional, and illogical, it is the fault of the public—more flunkeyfied, conventional, and illogical—whom it represents. ”

“ A Government situation is known to be a pleasant berth, and is jumped at as a man would jump at a freehold estate or a lump of Californian gold. A man who has any influence with the powers that be, or a younger son, instead of trying a trade or profession, will often seek a Government situation, trusting, with the income arising from it, he may live in town almost in idleness—at any rate in comparative luxury and ease. By the side of a Rothschild he may be poor, but really he is not so badly off, after all. ”

“ To the party in power he is always opposed. It is his pride that he never worships the rising sun. The Ex-Chancellor has never forgotten or forgiven the treatment he received, but it does not affect his health—it does not tinge his life with melancholy. He does not let disappointment, like a worm in the bud, prey upon his damask cheek. His hair is a little greyer—his face is a little fatter; that is all the change the wear and tear of half a century of public life has produced: and of such a half century! ”

“ Men must dine once in the twenty-four hours, and members of the House of Commons obey this universal law. Most of them have been hard at work all the day. It is no very pleasant life theirs, after all; crowded committee rooms all day, and the heated air of the House all night. An M.P. should have an iron frame as Joseph Hume had, or he cannot do his duty to his country or his constituents. Even we grow, as we sit in the gallery a few hours, weary as Mariana in the moated grange. ”

“ By Britons this feeling should not be entertained. That assembly contains, it is true, not the grandest, but the best practical intellects of which our country can boast. In its earliest days it rocked the cradle of our liberties, and still it guards them, though the stripling has long become a giant. At our elections there is deep-seated demoralisation, but still that demoralisation has its bounds which it cannot pass, and the high-minded and the honourable form the majority in the House of Commons. At any rate, the representative body is quite as virtuous and intelligent as the constituency. ”

“ In the new gallery they can never hear what was heard in the old—the philosophy of Burke—the wit of Sheridan—the passionate attacks of Fox—or the cool replies of Pitt. The House has become less oratorical—less an imperial senate, more of a national “vestry.” It discusses fewer principles, and more railway bills. The age of Pitt and Fox went with Pitt and Fox. You cannot recall it—the age has altered. You find Pitt and Fox now in the newspaper office, not in the senate. The old gallery has looked down on great men. ”

“ Gough spoke for nearly two hours. Evidently the audience could have listened, had he gone on, till midnight. We often hear that the age of oratory has gone by—that the press supersedes the tongue—that the appeal must henceforth be made to the reader in his study, not to the hearer in the crowded hall. There is much truth in that. Nevertheless, the true orator will always please his audience, and true oratory will never die. The world will always respond to it. The human heart will always leap up to it. The finest efforts of the orator have been amongst civilised audiences. ”

“ In those times happy—yea, thrice happy—were the fathers of families living beyond the sound of Bow bells. In these, how can a man help going to the bad, rise he ever so early, or sit he up ever so late, eat he ever so of the bread of carefulness, if mamma and daughters can ride from the furthest suburbs—from remote Peckham or airy Paddington—for the ridiculously small sum of sixpence, or even less, in a vehicle as luxuriously fitted up as a private carriage, to the shops so tempting to the female mind of the fashionable and dissipated West? Happily the evil is tending to cure itself. ”

“ The more unlettered be the age, the more triumphant will be this power; and when the theme is the stupendous one of religion—when in it, according to the belief of preacher and hearer, eternal interests are involved—woe that shall never pass away—joy that shall never die—when, moreover, this living appeal is put in the place of dead form or dreary routine, what wonder is it that before it should fade away the pagan faith of Greece or Rome? ”

“ The middle-class public go to hear—for it is the genteel thing to go to church—but they sit silent, passive, exhausted by the long preliminary service, wearied, and unmoved. What wonder is it that the more independent and manly—the men who do not fear Mrs. Grundy—who are not afraid of conventionalisms, either stop at home, or leave the Establishment for the more living service of dissent? ”

“ The Whig Nestor, the aged Marquis of Lansdowne, worthy of remembrance for his friendship for Tom Moore, is easily detected by his blue coat and brass buttons, that remnant of the palmy days of party. None of these men are remarkable for oratorical power. A strong contrast is presented by the illustrious personage sitting on the next row, higher up, just opposite the bishops—a severe, well-made, heavy, grey-haired man, who sits almost silent and sullen, as if he had no feelings, as if the debate was a sham, and he should be glad if it were over. ”

“ I have seen father, mother, children all sleeping, eating, living in one small apartment, ill-ventilated, inconvenient, and unhealthy; and I believe no class of labourers in this great metropolis, where so many thousands are ill-paid and hard-worked, and are reduced almost to the condition of brutes, suffer more than the coal-whippers you meet in that busy street of traffic and toil—the Commercial Road.
The coal-whippers are men employed to whip the coals out of the colliers into the barges, which latter bring them up for the supply of the inhabitants of London. ”

“ Then there are others to whom reporting is a mere mechanical calling, and nothing else; who do their week’s work and take their week’s wages, and are satisfied; but most of the parliamentary reporters are clever men, and all aspire to that character. The mistake is one a little self-love will easily induce a man to make. Men of infinite wit and spirit have been in the gallery; therefore, the men in the gallery now are men of infinite wit and spirit. A gorgeous superiority over other men is thus tacitly assumed. ”

“ It is childish to suppose that such a man as Mr. Bancroft was less respected at Paris than the Marquis of Normanby, or that Lord Cowley would less powerfully represent England were his salary of £10,000 cut down to £2,000. A thoughtful man can see, in the glitter and glare of gilded saloons, filled with flunkies and worshippers of the golden calf, nothing very creditable, or worthy of admiration. At the same time it must be remembered that, if the nation has efficient service, it is not grudging as regards expense. ”

“ On they come—ricketty carts laden with ginger beer—men with long barrows and short pipes, who have walked all the way from town, long trains of gigs and hansoms, and drags, and carriages, and ’busses, and pleasure vans, laden with pleasure seekers, determined to have a holiday. The trains bring down some thirty or forty thousand human souls, the road is blocked up and almost impassable. Many a party, who left town in good spirits, have come to grief. ”

“ The rule is a crisis and a crash; not a disgraceful one—for the unlucky ones, many of them, manage to pay twenty shillings in the pound eventually—but a crisis and a temporary suspension. In some cases where a man has been in trade many years, and has accumulated a handsome fortune, one unlucky speculation scatters it all, and compels him—old, and destitute of the energy of youth—to begin business again. ”

“ Christmas observes:—“Few will venture to say that the style of preaching most valued among nonconformists is inferior to that heard from the pulpits of the Establishment.” The reason is not far to seek: dissent has no ancient prestige to plead; dissent has no rich endowment to fall back on; dissent lives on and is strong in spite of the cold shade of aristocracy, or of the sneer of the bigot or the fool; dissent depends upon the pulpit. If that be weak and cold, and dull and dim, dissent melts like snow beneath the warm breath of the south. ”

“ Well, popular enthusiasm has toned down—the audience has reseated itself—a song of welcome has been sung, and there stands up a man of middle size and middle age. Lord Bacon deemed himself ancient when he was thirty-one—we moderns, in our excessive self-love, delude each other into the belief that we are middle-aged when we are anywhere between forty and sixty. In reality, a middle-aged man should be somewhere about thirty-five, and such we take to be Mr. Gough’s age. ”

“ The House of Commons is a mixed assembly. It contains the fool of quality—the Beotian squire—the needy adventurer—the unprincipled charlatan; but these men do not rule it—do not form its opinion—do not have much influence in it. It is an assembly right in the main. Practically it consists of well-endowed, well-informed business men—men with little enthusiasm, but with plenty of common sense, and with more than average intellect, integrity, and wealth. ”

“ Under these hospital walls—reared and maintained by Christian charity, what men once proud, and rich, and great—what women once tenderly nursed and slavishly obeyed—what beauties once fondly caressed, old, withered, wan, without money and without friends, alone in the bleak, bitter world—linger and pass away for ever. ”