oo much ground for believing. "A
country," he wrote (27th of April 1855) "which is discovered to be in
this tremendous condition as to its war affairs; with an enormous black
cloud of poverty in every town which is spreading and deepening every
hour, and not one man in two thousand knowing anything about, or even
believing in, its existence; with a non-working aristocracy, and a
silent parliament, and everybody for himself and nobody for the rest;
this is the prospect, and I think it a very deplorable one." Admirably
did he say, of a notorious enquiry at that time: "O what a fine aspect
of political economy it is, that the noble professors of the science on
the adulteration committee should have tried to make Adulteration a
question of Supply and Demand! We shall never get to the Millennium,
sir, by the rounds of that ladder; and I, for one, won't hold by the
skirts of that Great Mogul of impostors, Master M'Culloch!" Again he
wrote (30th of September 1855): "I really am serious in thinking--and I
have given as painful consideration to the subject as a man with
children to live and suffer after him can honestly give to it--that
representative government is become altogether a failure with us, that
the English gentilities and subserviences render the people unfit for
it, and that the whole thing has broken down since that great
seventeenth-century time, and has no hope in it."

With the good sense that still overruled all his farthest extremes of
opinion he yet never thought of parliament for himself. He could not
mend matters, and for him it would have been a false position. The
people of the town of Reading and others applied to him during the first
half of his life, and in the last half some of the Metropolitan
constituencies. To one of the latter a reply is before me in which he
says: "I declare that as to all matters on the face of this teeming
earth, it appears to me that the House of Commons and Parliament
altogether is become just the dreariest failure and nuisance that ever
bothered this much-bothered world." To a private enquiry of apparently
about the same date he replied: "I have thoroughly satisfied myself,
having often had occasion to consider the question, that I can be far
more usefully and independently employed in my chosen sphere of action
than I could hope to be in the House of Commons; and I believe that no
consideration would induce me to become a member of that extraordinary
assembly." Finally, upo