If rags and starvation put up their prayer
to the present Ministry, what must be the answer delivered by the Duke of
Wellington? "YE ARE DRUNKEN AND LAZY!"
If on the night of the 24th of August--the memorable night on which this
heartless insult was thrown in the idle teeth of famishing thousands--the
ghosts of the victims of the Corn Laws,--the spectres of the wretches who
had been ground out of life by the infamy of Tory taxation, could have
been permitted to lift the bed-curtains of Apsley-House,--his Grace the
Duke of Wellington would have been scared by even a greater majority than
ultimately awaits his fellowship in the present Cabinet. Still we can only
visit upon the Duke the censure of ignorance. "He knows not what he says."
If it be his belief that England suffers only because she is drunken and
idle, he knows no more of England than the Icelander in his sledge: if, on
the other hand, he used the libel as a party warfare, he is still one of
the "old set,"--and his "crowning carnage, Waterloo," with all its
greatness, is but a poor set-off against the more lasting iniquities which
he would visit upon his fellow-men. Anyhow, he cannot--he must not--escape
from his opinion; we will nail him to it, as we would nail a weasel to a
barn-door; "_if Englishmen want competence, they must be drunken--they
must be idle_.
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