Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, September 12, 1841 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 61 pages of information about Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, September 12, 1841.

Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, September 12, 1841 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 61 pages of information about Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, September 12, 1841.
world, with all his vices, like ulcers, upon him.  Well, Tory adopts the inevitable policy of Wiggins; he changes his name!  He comes forth, curled and sweetened, and with a smile upon his mealy face, and placing his felon hand above the vacuum on the left side of his bosom—­declares, whilst the tears he weeps would make a crocodile blush—­that he is by no means the Tory his wicked, heartless enemies would call him.  Certainly not.  His name is—­Conservative! There was, once, to be sure, a Tory—­in existence;

  “But he is dead, and nailed in his chest!”

He is a creature extinct, gone with the wolves annihilated by the Saxon monarch.  There may be the skeleton of the animal in some rare collections in the kingdom; but for the living creature, you shall as soon find a phoenix building in the trees of Windsor Park, as a Tory kissing hands in Windsor Castle!

The lie is but gulped as a truth, and Conservative is taken into service.  Once more, he is the factotum to JOHN BULL.  But when the knave shall have worn out his second name—­when he shall again be turned away—­look to your feather-beds, oh, JOHN! and foolish, credulous, leathern-eared Mr. BULL—­be sure and count your spoons!

Can it be supposed that the loss of office, that the ten years’ hunger for the loaves and fishes endured by the Tory party, has disciplined them into a wiser humanity?  Can it be believed that they have arrived at a more comprehensive grasp of intellect—­that they are ennobled by a loftier consideration of the social rights of man—­that they are gifted with a more stirring sympathy for the wants that, in the present iniquitous system of society, reduce him to little less than pining idiotcy, or madden him to what the statutes call crime, and what judges, sleek as their ermine, preach upon as rebellion to the government—­the government that, in fact, having stung starvation into treason, takes to itself the loftiest praise for refusing the hangman—­a task—­for appeasing Justice with simple transportation?

Already the Tories have declared themselves.  In the flush of anticipated success, PEEL at the Tamworth election denounced the French Revolution that escorted Charles the Tenth—­with his foolish head still upon his shoulders—­out of France, as the “triumph of might over right.”  It was the right—­the divine right of Charles—­(the sacred ampoule, yet dropping with the heavenly oil brought by the mystic dove for Clovis, had bestowed the privilege)—­to gag the mouth of man; to scourge a nation with decrees, begot by bigot tyranny upon folly—­to reduce a people into uncomplaining slavery.  Such was his right:  and the burst of indignation, the irresistible assertion of the native dignity of man, that shivered the throne of Charles like glass, was a felonious might—­a rebellious, treasonous potency—­the very wickedness of strength.  Such is the opinion of Conservative PEEL!  Such the old Tory faith of the child of Toryism!

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Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, September 12, 1841 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.