Letter XIX.—To Isaac Moss, Slop-seller, Portsmouth.
Dear Isaac,—Sir Robert Peel has stood your friend; and if you’ve only the money, and the freedom, and the luck, you may be Lord Mayor of London as soon as you like. You can’t, as a Jew, sit in Parliament as yet; but time goes round, Isaac, and I shouldn’t wonder if some day that was to come. Only think if a Jew—an hon. member for Whitechapel—was some day to find himself alongside of a Colonel Sibthorpe; for every Parliament has its Sibthorpe, just as every spring has its green geese.
Sir Robert Inglis, of course, stood up for Mother Church, who, in faith, must have a tremendous constitution, seeing how the dear creature has been ill-treated by all sorts of infidel politicians. I really do believe that Sibthorpe wouldn’t now trust Sir Robert with the church-plate; no, not even with the taking of the twopences at the door of St Paul’s, for fear he should cheat in his accounts.
Mr Plumptre would have nothing to do with the bill, because, he said, “every Christian man, who was sensible of his religious obligation, should consider what would be for the honour of the Most High.” Ah, Isaac, there it is! What a lot of wickedness has been done in this pretty world of ours—and all with a conscience—for what Christians thought would be “for the honour of the Most High”! For such honour men have roasted one another, as they wouldn’t roast live beasts, at a stake; for such honour they have done all sorts of wrong, shutting up their fellow-creatures in dungeons, and tearing and torturing them all manner of ways, as if they thought, when they did most wrong to mortal creatures, they did most honour to the good God that made them.
Well, Isaac, I’m only a cabman, but when I sometimes read the debates, I do now and then thank my stars that I’m out of Parliament. And then the conceit of them that’s in it. When they’ve done anything that’s good, what do they do? Why, they only walk about like the bird in the fable, in feathers of better people. They never do nothing of themselves. No good seed is ever grown in Parliament: not a bit of it; the thing’s grown outside of the place, and then transplanted. Talk of the wisdom of Parliament, Isaac! why, they get their wisdom from people who’ve never set their eyes upon Mr Speaker. What did Parliament ever begin, I should like to know? That is, understand me, what that’s good? No, good laws—wise laws—are begun outside; thought of, invented by quiet folks, who never think to put M.P. to their names; and whose great trouble it is to get the good acknowledged. And when at last, after wasting I don’t know how much of heaven’s good time—after the rumpus of many, many years—Parliament consents to take the good thing, I’m hanged if the goose doesn’t hatch the swan’s egg, as if it was a thing laid by itself, and not put into its nest by other people.
“The honour of the Most High!” Surely, Isaac, the best way to show such honour is to love your fellow-creatures as the greatest work—so far as we know—of the Most High; and not, poor small things as we are, to walk about the earth, and when we poke up our noses highest in the face of heaven, think we have then the best right to tread the hardest on the necks of everybody that don’t agree with us. To hear a few folks talk in Parliament, you’d think that they’d assured to themselves all Paradise as a freehold, and standing upon their rights, would set up in it man-traps and spring-guns against all intruders. However, never mind, Isaac. There was a time when a King of England would have drawn a tooth a day out of your jaws, if you didn’t undraw your purse-strings; and now—so do this wicked world roll on—you may wear a Lord Mayor’s chain, and, as a magistrate, commit vagrants to gaol like any Christian.—Your friend,
Juniper Hedgehog.