ts intimate to you that it
is not fair,--hasten, for the sake of Conservatism itself, to
probe it rigorously, to cast it forth at once and forever if
guilty. How will or can you preserve _it,_ the thing that is not
fair? 'Impossibility' a thousandfold is marked on that. And ye
call yourselves Conservatives, Aristocracies:--ought not honour
and nobleness of mind, if they had departed from all the Earth
elsewhere, to find their last refuge with you? Ye unfortunate!

The bough that is dead shall be cut away, for the sake of the
tree itself. Old? Yes, it is too old. Many a weary winter has
it swung and creaked there, and gnawed and fretted, with its dead
wood, the organic substance and still living fibre of this good
tree; many a long summer has its ugly naked brown defaced the
fair green umbrage; every day it has done mischief, and that
only: off with it, for the tree's sake, if for nothing more;
let the Conservatism that would preserve cut _it_ away. Did no
wood-forester apprise you that a dead bough with its dead root
left sticking there is extraneous, poisonous; is as a dead iron
spike, some horrid rusty ploughshare driven into the living
substance;--nay is far worse; for in every windstorm
('commercial crisis' or the like), it frets and creaks, jolts
itself to and fro, and cannot lie quiet as your dead iron
spike would!

If I were the Conservative Party of England (which is another
bold figure of speech), I would not for a hundred thousand pounds
an hour allow those Corn-Laws to continue! Potosi and Golconda
put together would not purchase my assent to them. Do you count
what treasuries of bitter indignation they are laying up for you
in every just English heart? Do you know what questions, not as
to Corn-prices and Sliding-scales alone, they are _forcing_ every
reflective Englishman to ask himself? Questions insoluble, or
hitherto unsolved; deeper than any of our Logic-plummets
hitherto will sound: questions deep enough,--which it were
better that we did not name even in thought! You are forcing us
to think of them, to begin uttering them. The utterance of them
is begun; and where will it be ended, think you? When two
millions of one's brother-men sit in Workhouses, and five
millions, as is insolently said, 'rejoice in potatoes,' there are
various things that must be begun, let them end where they can.

Chapter VI

Two Centuries

The Settlement effected by our 'Healing Parliament'