“I’m not speaking lightly,” said Felix.  “If I had not seen that I was making a hog of myself very fast, and that pig-wash, even if I could have got plenty of it, was a poor sort of thing, I should never have looked life fairly in the face to see what was to be done with it.  I laughed out loud at last to think of a poor devil like me, in a Scotch garret, with my stockings out at heel and a shilling or two to be dissipated upon, with a smell of raw haggis mounting from below, and old women breathing gin as they passed me on the stairs—­wanting to turn my life into easy pleasure.  Then I began to see what else it could be turned into.  Not much, perhaps.  This world is not a very fine place for a good many of the people in it.  But I’ve made up my mind it shan’t be the worse for me, if I can help it.  They may tell me I can’t alter the world—­that there must be a certain number of sneaks and robbers in it, And if I don’t lie and filch, somebody else will.  Well, then, somebody else shall, for I won’t.  That’s the upshot of my conversion.  Mr. Lyon, if you want to know it.”

When Felix gives Esther an account of his plans, and describes to her his purpose to do what he can to elevate his class, we have George Eliot’s own views on the subject of social reform.  Felix says,—­

“I want to be a demagogue of a new sort:  an honest one, if possible, who will tell the people they are blind and foolish, and neither flatter them nor batten on them.  I have my heritage—­an order I belong to.  I have the blood of a line of handicraftsmen in my veins, and I want to stand up for the lot of the handicraftsmen as a good lot, in which a man may be better trained to all the best functions of his nature, than if he belonged to the grimacing set who have visiting-cards, and are proud to be thought richer than their neighbors.”

That the leading aim of Felix Holt is to show the nature of true social reform may be seen in the address made by Felix at the election, and even more distinctly in the address put into his mouth in Blackwood’s Magazine for 1868.  In the election speech Felix gives it as his belief that if workingmen “go the right way to work they may get power sooner without votes” than with them, by the use of public opinion, “the greatest power under heaven.”  The novel points out the social complications of life, the influence of hereditary privileges and abuses, and how every attempt at reform is complicated by many interests, and is likely to fall into the hands of demagogues who use the workingmen for their own purposes.  The address of Felix in Blackwood’s is really a commentary on the novel, or rather a fine and suggestive summary of the moral, social and political idea; it was meant to inculcate.