But such private
opinions and inward wailings need not, and probably would not, guide
the body. Ichabod had been cried before, though probably never with
such intensity of feeling. Disestablishment might be worse than Free
Trade or Household Suffrage, but was not more absolutely opposed to
Conservative convictions than had been those great measures. And yet
the party, as a party, had swallowed them both. To the first and
lesser evil, a compact little body of staunch Commoners had stood
forth in opposition,--but nothing had come of it to those true
Britons beyond a feeling of living in the cold shade of exclusion.
When the greater evil arrived, that of Household Suffrage,--a measure
which twenty years since would hardly have been advocated by the
advanced Liberals of the day,--the Conservatives had learned to
acknowledge the folly of clinging to their own convictions, and had
swallowed the dose without serious disruption of their ranks. Every
man,--with but an exception or two,--took the measure up, some with
faces so singularly distorted as to create true pity, some with an
assumption of indifference, some with affected glee.
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