‘I am sorry for that.’

‘Sir Timothy is such a beast,’ said Silverbridge.

’Is that your notion of a political opinion?  Are you to be this or that in accordance with your own liking or disliking for some particular man?  One is supposed to have opinions of one’s own.’

‘Your father would be down on a man because he is a dissenter.’

‘Of course my father is old-fashioned.’

‘It does seem so hard to me,’ said Silverbridge, ’to find any difference between the two sets.  You who are a true Conservative are much more like to my father who is a Liberal than to your own who is on the same side as yourself.’

‘It may be so, and still I may be a good Conservative.’

’It seems to me in the house to mean nothing more than choosing one set of companions or choosing another.  There are some awful cads who sit along with Mr Monk;—­fellows that make you sick to hear them, and whom I couldn’t be civil to.  But I don’t think there is anybody I hate so much as old Beeswax.  He has a contemptuous way with his nose which makes me long to pull it.’

’And you mean to go over in order that you may be justified in doing so.  I think I soar a little higher,’ said Tregear.

‘Oh, of course.  You’re a clever fellow,’ said Silverbridge, not without a touch of sarcasm.

’A man may soar higher than that without being very clever.  If the party that calls itself liberal were to have all its own way who is there that doesn’t believe that the church would go at once, then all distinction between boroughs, the House of Lords immediately afterwards, and after that the Crown.’

‘Those are not my governor’s ideas.’

’You governor couldn’t help himself.  A liberal party, with plenipotentiary power, must go on right away to the logical conclusion of its arguments.  It is only the conservative feeling of the country which saves such men as your father from being carried headlong to ruin by their own machinery.  You have read Carlyle’s French Revolution?’

‘Yes, I have read that.’

’Wasn’t it so there?  There were a lot of honest men who thought they could do a deal of good by making everybody equal.  A good many were made equal be having their heads cut off.  That’s why I mean to be member of Polpenno and to send Mr Carbottle back to London.  Carbottle probably doesn’t want to cut anybody’s head off.’

‘I daresay he’s as conservative as anybody.’

’But he wants to be a member for Parliament; and, as he hasn’t thought much about anything he is quite willing to lend a hand to communism, radicalism, socialism, chopping people’s heads off, or anything else.’

‘That’s all very well,’ said Silverbridge, ’but where should we have been if there had been no Liberals?  Robespierre and his pals cut off a lot of heads, but Louis XIV and Louis XV locked up more in prison.’  And so he had the last word in the argument.