Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1018 page)

And I the fourth.  There's sure to be something in my line toward,

where politicians gathered together!

[The four Phantoms enter the Gallery of the House in the disguise

of ordinary strangers.]

SHERIDAN
[rising]

The Bill I would have leave to introduce

Is framed, sir, to repeal last Session's Act,

By party-scribes intituled a Provision

For England's Proper Guard; but elsewhere known

As Mr. Pitt's new Patent Parish Pill. 
[Laughter.]

The ministerial countenances, I mark,

Congeal to dazed surprise at my straight motion—

Why, passes sane conjecture.  It may be

That, with a haughty and unwavering faith

In their own battering-rams of argument,

They deemed our buoyance whelmed, and sapped, and sunk

To our hope's sheer bottom, whence a miracle

Was all could friend and float us; or, maybe,

They are amazed at our rude disrespect

In making mockery of an English Law

Sprung sacred from the King's own Premier's brain!

—I hear them snort; but let them wince at will,

My duty must be done; shall be done quickly

By citing some few facts.

     An Act for our defence!

It weakens, not defends; and oversea

Swoln France's despot and his myrmidons

This moment know it, and can scoff thereat.

Our people know it too—those who can peer

Behind the scenes of this poor painted show

Called soldiering!—The Act has failed, must fail,

As my right honourable friend well proved

When speaking t'other night, whose silencing

By his right honourable
vis a vis

Was of the genuine Governmental sort,

And like the catamarans their sapience shaped

All fizzle and no harm. 
[Laughter.]
  The Act, in brief,

Effects this much: that the whole force of England

Is strengthened by—eleven thousand men!

So sorted that the British infantry

Are now eight hundred less than heretofore!

In Ireland, where the glamouring influence

Of the right honourable gentleman

Prevails with magic might, ELEVEN men

Have been amassed.  And in the Cinque-Port towns,

Where he is held in absolute veneration,

His method has so quickened martial fire

As to bring in—one man.  O would that man

Might meet my sight! 
[Laughter.]
  A Hercules, no doubt,

A god-like emanation from this Act,

Who with his single arm will overthrow

All Buonaparte's legions ere their keels

Have scraped one pebble of our fortless shore!...

Such is my motion, sir, and such my mind.

[He sits down amid cheers.  The candle-snuffers go round, and Pitt

rises.  During the momentary pause before he speaks the House assumes

an attentive stillness, in which can be heard the rustling of the

trees without, a horn from an early coach, and the voice of the watch

crying the hour.]

PITT

Not one on this side but appreciates

Those mental gems and airy pleasantries

Flashed by the honourable gentleman,

Who shines in them by birthright.  Each device

Of drollery he has laboured to outshape,

[Or treasured up from others who have shaped it,]

Displays that are the conjurings of the moment,

[Or mellowed and matured by sleeping on]
—

Dry hoardings in his book of commonplace,

Stored without stint of toil through days and months—

He heaps into one mass, and light and fans

As fuel for his flaming eloquence,

Mouthed and maintained without a thought or care

If germane to the theme, or not at all.

Now vain indeed it were should I assay

To match him in such sort.  For, sir, alas,

To use imagination as the ground

Of chronicle, take myth and merry tale

As texts for prophecy, is not my gift

Being but a person primed with simple fact,

Unprinked by jewelled art.—But to the thing.

The preparations of the enemy,

Doggedly bent to desolate our land,

Advance with a sustained activity.

They are seen, they are known, by you and by us all.

But they evince no clear-eyed tentative

In furtherance of the threat, whose coming off,

Ay, years may yet postpone; whereby the Act

Will far outstrip him, and the thousands called

Duly to join the ranks by its provisions,

In process sure, if slow, will ratch the lines

Of English regiments—seasoned, cool, resolved—

To glorious length and firm prepotency.

And why, then, should we dream of its repeal

Ere profiting by its advantages?

Must the House listen to such wilding words

As this proposal, at the very hour

When the Act's gearing finds its ordered grooves

And circles into full utility?

The motion of the honourable gentleman

Reminds me aptly of a publican

Who should, when malting, mixing, mashing's past,

Fermenting, barrelling, and spigoting,

Quick taste the brew, and shake his sapient head,

And cry in acid voice: The ale is new!

Brew old, you varlets; cast this slop away! 
[Cheers.]

But gravely, sir, I would conclude to-night,

And, as a serious man on serious things,

I now speak here.... I pledge myself to this:

Unprecedented and magnificent

As were our strivings in the previous war,

Our efforts in the present shall transcend them,

As men will learn.  Such efforts are not sized

By this light measuring-rule my critic here

Whips from his pocket like a clerk-o'-works!...

Tasking and toilsome war's details must be,

And toilsome, too, must be their criticism,—

Not in a moment's stroke extemporized.

The strange fatality that haunts the times

Wherein our lot is cast, has no example.

Times are they fraught with peril, trouble, gloom;

We have to mark their lourings, and to face them.

Sir, reading thus the full significance

Of these big days, large though my lackings be,

Can any hold of those who know my past

That I, of all men, slight our safeguarding?

No: by all honour no!—Were I convinced

That such could be the mind of members here,

My sorrowing thereat would doubly shade

The shade on England now!  So I do trust

All in the House will take my tendered word,

And credit my deliverance here to-night,

That in this vital point of watch and ward

Against the threatenings from yonder coast

We stand prepared; and under Providence

Shall fend whatever hid or open stroke

A foe may deal.

[He sits down amid loud ministerial cheers, with symptoms of

great exhaustion.]

WINDHAM

The question that compels the House to-night

Is not of differences in wit and wit,

But if for England it be well or no

To null the new-fledged Act, as one inept

For setting up with speed and hot effect

The red machinery of desperate war.—

Whatever it may do, or not, it stands,

A statesman' raw experiment.  If ill,

Shall more experiments and more be tried

In stress of jeopardy that stirs demand

For sureness of proceeding?  Must this House

Exchange safe action based on practised lines

For yet more ventures into risks unknown

To gratify a quaint projector's whim,

While enemies hang grinning round our gates

To profit by mistake?

      My friend who spoke

Found comedy in the matter.  Comical

As it may be in parentage and feature,

Most grave and tragic in its consequence

This Act may prove.  We are moving thoughtlessly,

We squander precious, brief, life-saving time

On idle guess-games.  Fail the measure must,

Nay, failed it has already; and should rouse

Resolve in its progenitor himself

To move for its repeal! 
[Cheers.]

WHITBREAD

I rise but to subjoin a phrase or two

To those of my right honourable friend.

I, too, am one who reads the present pinch

As passing all our risks heretofore.

For why?  Our bold and reckless enemy,

Relaxing not his plans, has treasured time

To mass his monstrous force on all the coigns

From which our coast is close assailable.

Ay, even afloat his concentrations work:

Two vast united squadrons of his sail

Move at this moment viewless on the seas.—

Their whereabouts, untraced, unguessable,

Will not be known to us till some black blow

Be dealt by them in some undreamt-of quarter

To knell our rule.

That we are reasonably enfenced therefrom

By such an Act is but a madman's dream....

A commonwealth so situate cries aloud

For more, far mightier, measures!  End an Act

In Heaven's name, then, which only can obstruct

The fabrication of more trusty tackle

For building up an army! 
[Cheers.]

BATHURST

     Sir, the point

To any sober mind is bright as noon;

Whether the Act should have befitting trial

Or be blasphemed at sight.  I firmly hold

The latter loud iniquity.—One task

Is theirs who would inter this corpse-cold Act—

[So said]
—to bring to birth a substitute!

Sir, they have none; they have given no thought to one,

And this their deeds incautiously disclose

Their cloaked intention and most secret aim!

With them the question is not how to frame

A finer trick to trounce intrusive foes,

But who shall be the future ministers

To whom such trick against intrusive foes,

Whatever it may prove, shall be entrusted!

They even ask the country gentlemen

To join them in this job.  But, God be praised,

Those gentlemen are sound, and of repute;

Their names, their attainments, and their blood,

         
[Ironical Opposition cheers.]

Safeguard them from an onslaught on an Act

For ends so sinister and palpable! 
[Cheers and jeerings.]

FULLER

I disapprove of censures of the Act.—

All who would entertain such hostile thought

Would swear that black is white, that night is day.

No honest man will join a reckless crew

Who'd overthrow their country for their gain! 
[Laughter.]

TIERNEY

It is incumbent on me to declare

In the last speaker's face my censure, based

On grounds most clear and constitutional.—

An Act it is that studies to create

A standing army, large and permanent;

Which kind of force has ever been beheld

With jealous-eyed disfavour in this House.

It makes for sure oppression, binding men

To serve for less than service proves it worth

Conditioned by no hampering penalty.

For these and late-spoke reasons, then, I say,

Let not the Act deface the statute-book,

But blot it out forthwith. 
[Hear, hear.]

FOX
[rising amid cheers]

     At this late hour,

After the riddling fire the Act has drawn on't,

My words shall hold the House the briefest while.

Too obvious to the most unwilling mind

It grows that the existence of this law

Experience and reflection have condemned.

Professing to do much, it makes for nothing;

Not only so; while feeble in effect

It shows it vicious in its principle.

Engaging to raise men for the common weal

It sets a harmful and unequal tax

Capriciously on our communities.—

The annals of a century fail to show

More flagrant cases of oppressiveness

Than those this statute works to perpetrate,

Which
[like all Bills this favoured statesman frames,

And clothes with tapestries of rhetoric

Disguising their real web of commonplace]

Though held as shaped for English bulwarking,

Breathes in its heart perversities of party,

And instincts toward oligarchic power,

Galling the many to relieve the few! 
[Cheers.]

Whatever breadth and sense of equity

Inform the methods of this minister,

Those mitigants nearly always trace their root

To measures that his predecessors wrought.

And ere his Government can dare assert

Superior claim to England's confidence,

They owe it to their honour and good name

To furnish better proof of such a claim

Than is revealed by the abortiveness

Of this thing called an Act for our Defence.

To the great gifts of its artificer

No member of this House is more disposed

To yield full recognition than am I.

No man has found more reason so to do

Through the long roll of disputatious years

Wherein we have stood opposed....

But if one single fact could counsel me

To entertain a doubt of those great gifts,

And cancel faith in his capacity,

That fact would be the vast imprudence shown

In staking recklessly repute like his

On such an Act as he has offered us—

So false in principle, so poor in fruit.

Sir, the achievements and effects thereof