Everard shook his head to signify, ‘not half.’  But he was gentle enough in his observations.  ’There’s a motto, Ex pede Herculem.  You stepped out for the dogs to judge better of us.  It’s an infernally tripping motto for a composite structure like the kingdom of Great Britain and Manchester, boy Nevil.  We can fight foreigners when the time comes.’  He directed Nevil to look home, and cast an eye on the cotton-spinners, with the remark that they were binding us hand and foot to sell us to the biggest buyer, and were not Englishmen but ’Germans and Jews, and quakers and hybrids, diligent clerks and speculators, and commercial travellers, who have raised a fortune from foisting drugged goods on an idiot population.’

He loathed them for the curse they were to the country.  And he was one of the few who spoke out.  The fashion was to pet them.  We stood against them; were halfhearted, and were beaten; and then we petted them, and bit by bit our privileges were torn away.  We made lords of them to catch them, and they grocers of us by way of a return.  ‘Already,’ said Everard, ’they have knocked the nation’s head off, and dry-rotted the bone of the people.’

‘Don’t they,’ Nevil asked, ‘belong to the Liberal party?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ Everard replied, ’they belong to any party that upsets the party above them.  They belong to the George Foxe party, and my poultry-roosts are the mark they aim at.  You shall have a glance at the manufacturing district some day.  You shall see the machines they work with.  You shall see the miserable lank-jawed half-stewed pantaloons they’ve managed to make of Englishmen there.  My blood ’s past boiling.  They work young children in their factories from morning to night.  Their manufactories are spreading like the webs of the devil to suck the blood of the country.  In that district of theirs an epidemic levels men like a disease in sheep.  Skeletons can’t make a stand.  On the top of it all they sing Sunday tunes!’

This behaviour of corn-law agitators and protectors of poachers was an hypocrisy too horrible for comment.  Everard sipped claret.  Nevil lashed his head for the clear idea which objurgation insists upon implanting, but batters to pieces in the act.

‘Manchester’s the belly of this country!’ Everard continued.  ’So long as Manchester flourishes, we’re a country governed and led by the belly.  The head and the legs of the country are sound still; I don’t guarantee it for long, but the middle’s rapacious and corrupt.  Take it on a question of foreign affairs, it ’s an alderman after a feast.  Bring it upon home politics, you meet a wolf.’

The faithful Whig veteran spoke with jolly admiration of the speech of a famous Tory chief.