from a town to a village.  I do not see that Prince George of Denmark requires a hundred thousand pounds extra.  I should prefer receiving a poor sick man into the hospital, without compelling him to pay his funeral expenses in advance.  In Carnarvon, and at Strathmore, as well as at Strathbickan, the exhaustion of the poor is horrible.  At Stratford they cannot drain the marsh for want of money.  The manufactories are shut up all over Lancashire.  There is forced idleness everywhere.  Do you know that the herring fishers at Harlech eat grass when the fishery fails?  Do you know that at Burton-Lazars there are still lepers confined, on whom they fire if they leave their tan houses!  At Ailesbury, a town of which one of you is lord, destitution is chronic.  At Penkridge, in Coventry, where you have just endowed a cathedral and enriched a bishop, there are no beds in the cabins, and they dig holes in the earth in which to put the little children to lie, so that instead of beginning life in the cradle, they begin it in the grave.  I have seen these things!  My lords, do you know who pays the taxes you vote?  The dying!  Alas! you deceive yourselves.  You are going the wrong road.  You augment the poverty of the poor to increase the riches of the rich.  You should do the reverse.  What! take from the worker to give to the idle, take from the tattered to give to the well-clad; take from the beggar to give to the prince!  Oh yes!  I have old republican blood in my veins.  I have a horror of these things.  How I execrate kings!  And how shameless are the women!  I have been told a sad story.  How I hate Charles II.!  A woman whom my father loved gave herself to that king whilst my father was dying in exile.  The prostitute!  Charles II., James II.!  After a scamp, a scoundrel.  What is there in a king?  A man, feeble and contemptible, subject to wants and infirmities.  Of what good is a king?  You cultivate that parasite royalty; you make a serpent of that worm, a dragon of that insect.  O pity the poor!  You increase the weight of the taxes for the profit of the throne.  Look to the laws which you decree.  Take heed of the suffering swarms which you crush.  Cast your eyes down.  Look at what is at your feet.  O ye great, there are the little.  Have pity! yes, have pity on yourselves; for the people is in its agony, and when the lower part of the trunk dies, the higher parts die too.  Death spares no limb.  When night comes no one can keep his corner of daylight.  Are you selfish? then save others.  The destruction of the vessel cannot be a matter of indifference to any passenger.  There can be no wreck for some that is not wreck for all.  O believe it, the abyss yawns for all!”

The laughter increased, and became irresistible.  For that matter, such extravagance as there was in his words was sufficient to amuse any assembly.  To be comic without and tragic within, what suffering can be more humiliating? what pain deeper?  Gwynplaine felt it.  His words were an appeal in one direction, his face in the other.  What a terrible position was his!