I want at all
times, in full sincerity, to do my duty by my countrymen. If _I_
feel an attachment towards them, there is nothing disinterested or
meritorious in that, for I can never too affectionately remember
the confidence and friendship that they have long reposed in me.
My sphere of action--which I shall never change--I shall never
overstep, further than this, or for a longer period than I do to-
night. By literature I have lived, and through literature I have
been content to serve my country; and I am perfectly well aware
that I cannot serve two masters. In my sphere of action I have
tried to understand the heavier social grievances, and to help to
set them right. When the Times newspaper proved its then almost
incredible case, in reference to the ghastly absurdity of that vast
labyrinth of misplaced men and misdirected things, which had made
England unable to find on the face of the earth, an enemy one-
twentieth part so potent to effect the misery and ruin of her noble
defenders as she has been herself, I believe that the gloomy
silence into which the country fell was by far the darkest aspect
in which a great people had been exhibited for many years. With
shame and indignation lowering among all classes of society, and
this new element of discord piled on the heaving basis of
ignorance, poverty and crime, which is always below us--with little
adequate expression of the general mind, or apparent understanding
of the general mind, in Parliament--with the machinery of
Government and the legislature going round and round, and the
people fallen from it and standing aloof, as if they left it to its
last remaining function of destroying itself, when it had achieved
the destruction of so much that was dear to them--I did and do
believe that the only wholesome turn affairs so menacing could
possibly take, was, the awaking of the people, the outspeaking of
the people, the uniting of the people in all patriotism and loyalty
to effect a great peaceful constitutional change in the
administration of their own affairs.
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