第100章

Every snob who can grind the poor does grind them; but a gentleman never, and he hinders others. Now, for instance, an English farmer is generally a tyrant; but my power limits his tyranny. He may discharge his laborer, but he can't drive him out of the village, nor rob him of parish relief, for poor Hodge is _my_ tenant, not a snob's. Nobody can build a beershop in Islip. That is true. But if they could, they would sell bad beer, give credit in the ardor of competition, poison the villagers, and demoralize them. Believe me, republican institutions are beautiful on paper; but they would not work well in Barfordshire villages. However, you profess to go by experience in everything. There are open villages within five miles. I'll give you a list. Visit them. You will find that liberty can be the father of tyranny. Petty tradesmen have come in and built cottages, and ground the poor down with rents unknown in Islip; farmers have built cottages, and turned their laborers into slaves. Drunkenness, dissipation, poverty, disaffection, and misery--that is what you will find in the open villages. Now, in Islip you have an omnipotent squire, and that is an abomination in theory, a mediaeval monster, a blot on modern civilization; but practically the poor monster is a softener of poverty, an incarnate buffer between the poor and tyranny, the poor and misery.""I'll inspect the open villages, and suspend my opinion till then," said Miss Gale, heartily; "but, in the meantime, you must admit that where there is great power there is great responsibility.""Oh, of course."

"Well, then, your little outlying province of Hillstoke is full of rheumatic adults and putty-faced children. The two phenomena arise from one cause--the water. No lime in it, and too many reptiles. It was the children gave me the clew. I suspected the cherry stones at first: but when I came to look into it, I found they eat just as many cherry stones in the valley, and are as rosy as apples; but, then, there is well water in the valleys. So I put this and that together, and I examined the water they drink at Hillstoke. Sir, it is full of animalcula. Some of these cannot withstand the heat of the human stomach; but others can, for Itried them in mud artificially heated. [A giggle from Fanny Dover.]

Thanks to your microscope, I have made sketches of several amphibia who live in those boys' stomachs, and irritate their membranes, and share their scanty nourishment, besides other injuries." Thereupon she produced some drawings.

They were handed round, and struck terror in gentle bosoms. "Oh, gracious!" cried Fanny, "one ought to drink nothing but champagne."Uxmoor looked grave. Vizard affected to doubt their authenticity. He said, "You may not know it, but I am a zoologist, and these are antediluvian eccentricities that have long ceased to embellish the world we live in. Fie! Miss Gale. Down with anachronisms."Miss Gale smiled, and admitted that one or two of the prodigies resembled antediluvian monsters, but said oracularly that nature was fond of producing the same thing on a large scale and a small scale, and it was quite possible the small type of antediluvian monster might have survived the large.

"That is most ingenious," said Vizard; "but it does not account for this fellow. He is not an antediluvian; he is a barefaced modern, for he is ASTEAM ENGINE."

This caused a laugh, for the creature had a perpendicular neck, like a funnel, that rose out of a body like a horizontal cylinder.

"At any rate," said Miss Gale, "the little monster was in the world first; so he is not an imitation of man's work.""Well," said Vizard, "after all, we have had enough of the monsters of the deep. Now we can vary the monotony, and say the monsters of the shallow. But I don't see how they can cause rheumatism.""I never said they did," retorted Miss Gale, sharply: "but the water which contains them is soft water. There is no lime in it, and that is bad for the bones in every way. Only the children drink it as it is: the wives boil it, and so drink soft water and dead reptiles in their tea.

The men instinctively avoid it and drink nothing but beer. Thus, for want of a pure diluent with lime in solution, an acid is created in the blood which produces gout in the rich, and rheumatism in the poor, thanks to their meager food and exposure to the weather.""Poor things!" said womanly Zoe. "What is to be done?""La!" said Fanny, "throw lime into the ponds. That will kill the monsters, and cure the old people's bones into the bargain."This compendious scheme struck the imagination, but did not satisfy the judgment of the assembly.

"Fanny!" said Zoe, reproachfully.

"That _would_ be killing two birds with one stone," suggested Uxmoor, satirically.

"The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel," explained Vizard, composedly.

Zoe reiterated her question, What was to be done?

Miss Gale turned to her with a smile. _"We_ have got nothing to do but to point out these abominations. The person to act is the Russian autocrat, the paternal dictator, the monarch of all he surveys, and advocate of monarchial institutions. He is the buffer between the poor and all their ills, especially poison: he must dig a well."Every eye being turned on Vizard to see how he took this, he said, a little satirically, "What! does Science bid me bore for water at the top of a hill?""She does _so,"_ said the virago. "Now look here, good people."And although they were not all good people, yet they all did look there, she shone so with intelligence, being now quite on her mettle.