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 tonight.
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 onetwentieth
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. At such a
crisis this association arose; at such a crisis I joined it:
considering its further case to be – if further case could possibly
be needed – that what is everybody’s business is nobody’s business,
that men must be gregarious in good citizenship as well as in other
things, and that it is a law in nature that there must be a centre
of attraction for particles to fly to, before any serviceable body
with recognised functions can come into existence. This
association has arisen, and we belong to it. What are the
objections to it? I have heard in the main but three, which I will
now briefly notice. It is said that it is proposed by this
association to exercise an influence, through the constituencies,
on the House of Commons. I have not the least hesitation in saying
that I have the smallest amount of faith in the House of Commons at
present existing and that I consider the exercise of such influence
highly necessary to the welfare and honour of this country. I was
reading no later than yesterday the book of Mr. Pepys, which is
rather a favourite of mine, in which he, two hundred years ago,
writing of the House of Commons, says:
“My cousin Roger Pepys tells me that it is matter of the greatest
Page 40
Dickens, Charles – Speeches, Literary & Social
grief to him in the world that he should be put upon this trust of
being a Parliament man; because he says nothing is done, that he
can see, out of any truth and sincerity, but mere envy and design.”
Now, how it comes to pass that after two hundred years, and many
years after a Reform Bill, the house of Commons is so little
changed, I will not stop to inquire. I will not ask how it happens
that bills which cramp and worry the people, and restrict their
scant enjoyments, are so easily passed, and how it happens that
measures for their real interests are so very difficult to be got
through Parliament. I will not analyse the confined air of the
lobby, or reduce to their primitive gases its deadening influences
on the memory of that Honourable Member who was once a candidate