The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0063/00634.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 14KB | 229 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00634}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Anthology Of Shorter Works
Our Honorable Friend}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{friend
honourable
honorable
mean
verbosity
tipkisson
principles
gentlemen
now
always}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       Anthology Of Shorter Works
Book:        Our Honorable Friend
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Our Honorable Friend

     We are delighted to find that he has got in!  Our honorable friend is
triumphantly returned to serve in the next Parliament.  He is the honorable
member for Verbosity - the best represented place in England.

     Our honorable friend has issued an address of congratulation to the
Electors, which is worthy of that noble constituency, and is a very pretty
piece of composition.  In electing him, he says, they have covered themselves
with glory, and England has been true to herself.  (In his preliminary
address he had remarked, in a poetical quotation of great rarity, that naught
could make us rue, if England to herself did prove but true.)

     Our honorable friend delivers a prediction, in the same document, that
the feeble minions of a faction will never hold up their heads any more; and
that the finger of scorn will point at them in their dejected state, through
countless ages of time.  Further, that the hireling tools that would destroy
the sacred bulwarks of our nationality are unworthy of the name of
Englishmen; and that so long as the sea shall roll around our ocean-girded
isle, so long his motto shall be, No Surrender.  Certain dogged persons of
low principles and no intellect, have disputed whether any body knows who the
minions are, or what the faction is, or which are the hireling tools and
which the sacred bulwarks, or what it is that is never to be surrendered, and
if not, why not?  But, our honorable friend, the member for Verbosity knows
all about it.

     Our honorable friend has sat in several parliaments, and given bushels
of votes.  He is a man of that profundity in the matter of vote-giving, that
you never know what he means.  When he seems to be voting pure white he may
be in reality voting jet black.  When he says Yes, it is just as likely as
not - or rather more so - that he means No.  This is the statesmanship of our
honorable friend.  It is in this that he differs from mere unparliamentary
men.  You may not know what he meant then, or what he means now; but our
honorable friend knows, and did from the first know, both what he meant then,
and what he means now: and when he said he didn't mean it then, he did in
fact say that he means it now.  And if you mean to say that you did not then,
and do not now, know what he did mean then, or does mean now, our honorable
friend will be glad to receive an explicit declaration from you whether you
are prepared to destroy the sacred bulwarks of our nationality.

     Our honorable friend, the member for Verbosity, has this great
attribute, that he always means something, and always means the same thing.
When he came down to that House and mournfully boasted in his place, as an
individual member of the assembled Commons of this great and happy country,
that he could lay his head upon his heart, and solemnly declare that no
consideration on earth should induce him, at any time or under any
circumstances, to go as far north as Berwick-upon-Tweed; and when he
nevertheless, next year, did go to Berwick-upon-Tweed, and even beyond it,
to Edinburgh; he had one single meaning, one and indivisible.  And God forbid
(our honorable friend says) that he should waste another argument upon the
man who professes that he cannot understand it!  "I do not, gentlemen," said
our honorable friend, with indignant emphasis and amid great cheering, on one
such public occasion.  "I do not, gentlemen, I am free to confess, envy the
feelings of that man whose mind is so constituted as that he can hold such
language to me, and yet lay his head upon his pillow, claiming to be a native
of that land,

     Whose march is o'er the mountain-wave,
     Whose home is on the deep!

     (Vehement cheering, and man expelled.)

     When our honorable friend issued his preliminary address to the
constituent body of Verbosity on the occasion of one particular glorious
triumph, it was supposed by some of his enemies, that even he would be placed
in a situation of difficulty by the following comparatively trifling
conjunction of circumstances.  The dozen noblemen and gentlemen, whom our
honorable friend supported, had "come in," expressly to do a certain thing.
Now, four of the dozen said, at a certain place, that they didn't mean to do
that thing, and had never meant to do it; another four of the dozen said, at
another certain place, that they did mean to do that thing, and had always
meant to do it; two of the remaining four said, at two other places, that
they meant to do half of that thing (but differed about which half), and to
do a variety of nameless wonders instead of the other half; and one of the
remaining two declared that the thing itself was dead and buried, while the
other as strenuously protested that it was alive and kicking.  It was
admitted that the parliamentary genius of our honorable friend would be quite
able to reconcile such small discrepancies as these; but, there remained
the additional difficulty that each of the twelve made entirely different
statements at different places, and that all the twelve called everything
visible and invisible, sacred and profane, to witness, that they were a
perfectly impregnable phalanx of unanimity.  This, it was apprehended, would
be a stumbling-block to our honorable friend.

     The difficulty came before our honorable friend, in this way.  He went
down to Verbosity to meet his free and independent constituents, and to
render an account (as he informed them in the local papers) of the trust they
had confided to his hands - that trust which it was one of the proudest
privileges of an Englishman to possess - that trust which it was the proudest
privilege of an Englishman to hold.  It may be mentioned as a proof of the
great general interest attaching to the contest, that a Lunatic whom nobody
employed or knew, went down to Verbosity with several thousand pounds in
gold, determined to give the whole away - which he actually did; and that all
the publicans opened their houses for nothing.  Likewise, several fighting
men, and a patriotic group of burglars sportively armed with life-preservers,
proceeded (in barouches and very drunk) to the scene of action at their own
expense; these children of nature having conceived a warm attachment to our
honorable friend, and intending, in their artless manner, to testify it by
knocking the voters in the opposite interest on the head.

     Our honorable friend being come into the presence of his constituents,
and having professed with great suavity that he was delighted to see his good
friend Tipkisson there, in his working dress - his good friend Tipkisson
being an inveterate saddler, who always opposes him, and for whom he has a
mortal hatred - made them a brisk, ginger-beery sort of speech, in which he
showed them how the dozen noblemen and gentlemen had (in exactly ten days
from their coming in) exercised a surprisingly beneficial effect on the
whole financial condition of Europe, had altered the state of the exports and
imports for the current half-year, had prevented the drain of gold, had made
all that matter right about the glut of the raw material, and had restored
all sorts of balances with which the superseded noblemen and gentlemen had
played the deuce - and all this, with wheat at so much a quarter, gold at so
much an ounce, and the Bank of England discounting good bills at so much per
cent!  He might be asked, he observed in a peroration of great power, what
were his principles?  His principles were what they always had been.  His
principles were written in the countenances of the lion and unicorn; were
stamped indelibly upon the royal shield which those grand animals supported,
and upon the f