Clara Hopgood

'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.'