Turnbull, had a clause in his
breeches-pocket which he would either force down the unwilling throat
of Mr. Mildmay, or else drive the imbecile Premier from office by
carrying it in his teeth. Loughton, as Loughton, must be destroyed,
but it should be born again in a better birth as a part of a
real electoral district, sending a real member, chosen by a real
constituency, to a real Parliament. In those days,--and they would
come soon,--Mr. Quintus Slide rather thought that Mr. Phineas Finn
would be found "nowhere," and he rather thought also that when he
showed himself again, as he certainly should do, in the midst of that
democratic electoral district as the popular candidate for the honour
of representing it in Parliament, that democratic electoral district
would accord to him a reception very different from that which he
was now receiving from the Earl's lacqueys in the parliamentary
village of Loughton. A prettier bit of fiction than these sentences
as composing a part of any speech delivered, or proposed to be
delivered, at Loughton, Phineas thought he had never seen. And when
he read at the close of the speech that though the Earl's hired
bullies did their worst, the remarks of Mr. Slide were received by
the people with reiterated cheering, he threw himself back in his
chair at the Treasury and roared.
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