'Apart altogether from purely material reasons,' said Dennis, 'we
have rights; we are born into this planet without our consent, and,
therefore, we may make certain demands.'
'Do you not think,' said Clara, 'that the repeal of the corn laws
will help you?' Dennis smiled and was about to reply, but Marshall broke out
savagely, 'Repeal of the corn laws is a contemptible device of manufacturing
selfishness. It means low wages. Do you suppose the great
Manchester cotton lords care one straw for their hands? Not they!
They will face a revolution for repeal because it will enable them to
grind an extra profit out of us.'
'I agree with you entirely,' said Dennis, turning to Clara, 'that a
tax upon food is wrong; it is wrong in the abstract. The notion of
taxing bread, the fruit of the earth, is most repulsive; but the
point is--what is our policy to be? If a certain end is to be
achieved, we must neglect subordinate ends, and, at times, even
contradict what our own principles would appear to dictate. That is
the secret of successful leadership.' He took up the poker and stirred the fire.
'That will do, Dennis,' said Marshall, who was evidently fidgety.
'The room is rather warm. There's nothing in Vincent which irritates
me more than those bits of poetry with which he winds up.
"God made the man--man made the slave," and all that stuff. If God made the man, God made the slave. I knowwhat Vincent's little game is, and it is the same game with all his
set. They want to keep Chartism religious, but we shall see. Let us
once get the six points, and the Established Church will go, and we
shall have secular education, and in a generation there will not be
one superstition left.'
'Theological superstition, you mean?' said Clara.
'Yes, of course, what others are there worth notice?'
'A few. The superstition of the ordinary newspaper reader is just as
profound, and the tyranny of the majority may be just as injurious as
the superstition of a Spanish peasant, or the tyranny of the
Inquisition.'
'Newspapers will not burn people as the priests did and would do
again if they had the power, and they do not insult us with fables
and a hell and a heaven.'
'I maintain,' said Clara with emphasis, 'that if a man declines to
examine, and takes for granted what a party leader or a newspaper
tells him, he has no case against the man who declines to examine, or
takes for granted what the priest tells him. Besides, although, as
you know, I am not a convert myself, I do lose a little patience when
I hear it preached as a gospel to every poor conceited creature who
goes to your Sunday evening atheist lecture, that he is to believe
nothing on one particular subject which his own precious intellect
cannot verify, and the next morning he finds it to be his duty to
swallow wholesale anything you please to put into his mouth. As to
the tyranny, the day may come, and I believe is approaching, when the
majority will be found to be more dangerous than any ecclesiastical
establishment which ever existed.'