Ginx's Baby [33]
in the smoking-room next evening that ought to be chronicled. Several members of the committee supported his benefactor in urging that the child should be adopted by the Club, as a pledge of their resolve to make the questions of which he seemed to be the embodied emblem subjects of legislative action. Others said that those questions being, in their view, social and not political, were not proper ones to give impulse to a party movement, and that the entertainment in the Club of this foundling would be a gross irregularity: they did not want samples of the material respecting which they were theorizing. To some of the latter Sir Charles had been insisting that, whether they kept the child or not, they could not stifle the questions excited by his condition. "You may delay, but you cannot dissipate them. We are filling up our sessions with party struggles, theoretic discussions, squabbles about foreign politics, debates on political machinery, while year by year the condition of the people is becoming more invidious and full of peril. Social and political reform ought to be linked; the people on whom you confer new political rights cannot enjoy them without health and well-being." "But all our legislation is directed to that!" exclaimed Mr. Joshua Hale. "Reform, Free Trade, Free Corn--have these not enhanced the wealth of the people?" "Partially; yet there are classes unregenerated by their reviving influences. Free trade cannot insure work, nor can free corn provide food for every citizen." "Nor any other legislation: let us be practical. I own there is much to be done. I have often stated my 'platform.' We must clip the enormous expenditure on soldiers and ships; reduce our overweening army of diplomatic spies and busybodies; abstain from meddling in everybody's quarrels; redeem from taxation the workman's necessaries--a free breakfast-table; peremptorily legislate against the custom of primogeniture; encourage the distribution and transfer of land; and, under the aegis of the ballot, protect from the tyranny of the landlord and employer their tenants and workmen." "Very good, perhaps, all of them," replied Sir Charles, "but some not at the moment possible, and all together are not exhaustive. Why do you not go to the bottom of social needs? You say nothing about Health legislation--are you indifferent to the sanitary condition of the people? You have not hinted at Education--Waste Lands--Emigration--" "Oh! I am opposed to that altogether." "I forgot, you are a manufacturer; yet the last man of whom I should believe that selfishness had warped the judgment. You have done and endured more than any living statesman for the advantage of your fellow- citizens, so that I will not cast at you the aspersion of class-blindness. Still, I can scarcely think you have looked at this matter in the pure light of patriotism, and not within the narrow scope of trade interests." "Quite unjust. Our best economists reprehend the policy of depleting our labor-market. Emigration is a timely remedy for adversity and to be very sparingly used. Labor is our richest vein--" "We may have too much of it. Take it as a fact that you now have more than you can use, and the unemployed part is starving; what will you do with them?" "That is a mere temporary and casual depression, to which all classes are liable." "But," said Sir Charles, "which none can so ill bear. Nay--what if it is permanent? You look to increased trade. Do you suppose we are to retain our manufacturing pre-eminence when every country, new and old, is competing with us? Can our trade, I ask you honestly to consider, increase at the rate of our population? Besides, for heaven's sake, look at the thing as a man. Grant that we have a hundred thousand men out of work, and hundreds of thousands more dependent on them--do you think it no small thing that the vast mass should be left for one, two, three years seething in sorrow and distress, while they are waiting for trade! By the time that comes they may have gone beyond the hope