“——­ Let ’em cleanse them themselves!  Soap’s cheap enough with your ——­ free trade, ain’t it!  No, sir!  That sort of talk will do well enough for my Lord Minchampstead, sir, the old money-lending Jew! ——­ but gentlemen, sir, gentlemen, that are half-ruined with free trade, and your Whig policy, sir, you must give ’em back their rights before they can afford to throw away their money on cottages.  Cottages, indeed! ——­ upstart of a cotton-spinner, coming down here, buying the lands over our heads, and pretends to show us how to manage our estates; old families that have been in the county this four hundred years, with the finest peasantry in the world ready to die for them, sir, till these new revolutionary doctrines came in—­Pride and purse-proud conceit, just to show off his money!  What do they want with better cottages than their fathers had?  Only put notions into their heads, raise ’em above their station; more they have, more they’ll want. ——­ sir, make chartists of ’em all before he’s done!  I’ll tell you what, sir,”—­and Mr. Trebooze attempted a dignified and dogmatic tone—­“I never told it you before, because you were my very good friend, sir:  but my opinion is, sir, that by what you’re doing up at Pentremochyn, you’re just spreading chartism—­chartism, sir!  Of course I know nothing.  Of course I’m nobody, in these days:  but that’s my opinion, sir, and you’ve got it!”

By which motion Tom took little.  Mighty is envy always, and mighty ignorance:  but you become aware of their truly Titanic grandeur only when you attempt to touch their owner’s pocket.

Tom tried old Heale:  but took as little in that quarter.  Heale had heard of sanitary reform, of course; but he knew nothing about it, and gave a general assent to Tom’s doctrines, for fear of exposing his own ignorance:  acting on them was a very different matter.  It is always hard for an old medical man to confess that anything has been discovered since the days of his youth; and beside, there were other reasons behind, which Heale tried to avoid giving; and therefore fenced off, and fenced off, till, pressed hard by Tom, wrath came forth, and truth with it.

“And what be you thinking of, sir, to expect me to offend all my best patients? and not one of ’em but rents some two cottages, some a dozen.  And what’ll they say to me if I go a routing and rookling in their drains, like an old sow by the wayside, beside putting ’em to all manner of expense?  And all on the chance of this cholera coming, which I have no faith in, nor in this new-fangled sanitary reform neither, which is all a dodge for a lot of young Government puppies to fill their pockets, and rule and ride over us:  and my opinion always was with the Bible, that ’tis jidgment, sir, a jidgment of God, and we can’t escape His holy will, and that’s the plain truth of it.”

Tom made no answer to that latter argument.  He had heard that “’tis jidgment” from every mouth during the last few days; and had mortally offended the Brianite preacher that very morning, by answering his “’tis jidgment” with—­