orceps!" Nature, a far juster
Sovereign, has far terribler forceps. Aristocracies, actual and
imaginary, reach a time when parchment pleading does not avail them.
"Go to, for all thy parchments, thou shalt pay due debt!" shouts the
Universe to them, in an emphatic manner. They refuse to pay,
confidently pleading parchment: their best grinder-tooth, with
horrible agony, goes out of their jaw. Wilt thou pay now? A second
grinder, again in horrible agony, goes: a second, and a third, and if
need be, all the teeth and grinders, and the life itself with
them;--and _then_ there is free payment, and an anatomist-subject into
the bargain!

Reform Bills, Corn-Law Abrogation Bills, and then Land-Tax Bill,
Property-Tax Bill, and still dimmer list of _etceteras_; grinder after
grinder:--my lords and gentlemen, it were better for you to arise and
begin doing your work, than sit there and plead parchments!

* * * * *

We write no Chapter on the Corn-Laws, in this place; the Corn-Laws are
too mad to have a Chapter. There is a certain immorality, when there
is not a necessity, in speaking about things finished; in chopping
into small pieces the already slashed and slain. When the brains are
out, why does not a Solecism die? It is at its own peril if it refuse
to die; it ought to make all conceivable haste to die, and get itself
buried! The trade of Anti-Corn-Law Lecturer in these days, still an
indispensable, is a highly tragic one.

The Corn-Laws will go, and even soon go: would we were all as sure of
the Millennium as they are of going! They go swiftly in these present
months; with an increase of velocity, an ever-deepening,
ever-widening sweep of momentum, truly notable. It is at the
Aristocracy's own damage and peril, still more than at any other's
whatsoever, that the Aristocracy maintains them;--at a damage, say
only, as above computed, of a 'hundred thousand pounds an hour'! The
Corn-Laws keep all the air hot: fostered by their fever-warmth, much
that is evil, but much also, how much that is good and indispensable,
is rapidly coming to life among us!

CHAPTER IX.

WORKING ARISTOCRACY.

A poor Working Mammonism getting itself 'strangled in the
partridge-nets of an Unworking Dilettantism,' and bellowing
dreadfully, and already black in the face, is surely a disastrous
spectacle! But of a Midas-eared Mammonism, which indeed at bottom all
pure Mammonisms are, what better can you expec