The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [33]
This exclamation, my father knew was unanswerable;----and yet, it was not merely to shelter himself,—nor was it altogether for the care of his offspring and wife that he seem’d so extremely anxious about this point;—my father had extensive views of things,——and stood, moreover, as he thought, deeply concern’d in it for the publick good, from the dread he entertained of the bad uses an ill-fated instance might be put to.
He was very sensible that all political writers upon the subject had unanimously agreed and lamented, from the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign down to his own time, that the current of men and money towards the metropolis, upon one frivolous errand or another,—set in so strong,—as to become dangerous to our civil rights;—tho’, by the bye,——a current was not the image he took most delight in,–a distemper was here his favourite metaphor, and he would run it down into a perfect allegory, by maintaining it was identically the same in the body national as in the body natural,6 where blood and spirits were driven up into the head faster than they could find their ways down;——a stoppage of circulation must ensue, which was death in both cases.
There was little danger, he would say, of losing our liberties by French politicks or French invasions;——nor was he so much in pain of a consumption from the mass of corrupted matter and ulcerated humours in our constitution,—which he hoped was not so bad as it was imagined;—but he verily feared, that in some violent push, we should go off, all at once, in a state-apoplexy;—and then he would say, The Lord have mercy upon us all.
My father was never able to give the history of this distemper,—without the remedy along with it.
“Was I an absolute prince, he would say, pulling up his breeches with both his hands, as he rose from his arm-chair, “I would appoint able judges, at every avenue of my metropolis, who should take cognizance of every fool’s business who came there;—and if, upon a fair and candid hearing, it appeared not of weight sufficient to leave his own home, and come up, bag and baggage, with his wife and children, farmers sons, &c. &c. at his backside, they should be all sent back, from constable to constable, like vagrants as they were, to the place of their legal settlements. By this means, I shall take care, that my metropolis totter’d not thro’ its own weight;—that the head be no longer too big for the body;—that the extreams, now wasted and pin’d in, be restored to their due share of nourishment, and regain, with it, their natural strength and beauty:–I would effectually provide, That the meadows and corn-fields, of my dominions, should laugh and sing;—that good chear and hospitality flourish once more;—and that such weight and influence be put thereby into the hands of the Squirality7 of my kingdom, as should counterpoise what I perceive my Nobility are now taking from them.
“Why are there so few palaces and gentlemen’s seats, he would ask, with some emotion, as he walked a-cross the room, “throughout so many delicious provinces in France? Whence is it that the few remaining Chateaus amongst them are so dismantled,—so unfurnished, and in so ruinous and desolate a condition?—Because, Sir, (he would say) “in that kingdom no man has any country-interest8 to support;—the little interest of any kind, which any man has any where in it, is concentrated in the court, and the