's not fitted to be a public man,« said Lydgate, with contemptuous
decision. »He would disappoint everybody who counted on him: I can see that at
the Hospital. Only, there Bulstrode holds the reins and drives him.«
    »That depends on how you fix your standard of public men,« said Will. »He's
good enough for the occasion: when the people have made up their mind as they
are making it up now, they don't want a man - they only want a vote.«
    »That is the way with you political writers, Ladislaw - crying up a measure
as if it were a universal cure, and crying up men who are a part of the very
disease that wants curing.«
    »Why not? Men may help to cure themselves off the face of the land without
knowing it,« said Will, who could find reasons impromptu, when he had not
thought of a question beforehand.
    »That is no excuse for encouraging the superstitious exaggeration of hopes
about this particular measure, helping the cry to swallow it whole and to send
up voting popinjays who are good for nothing but to carry it. You go against
rottenness, and there is nothing more thoroughly rotten than making people
believe that society can be cured by a political hocus-
    »That's very fine, my dear fellow. But your cure must begin somewhere, and
put it that a thousand things which debase a population can never be reformed
without this particular reform to begin with. Look what Stanley said the other
day - that the House had been tinkering long enough at small questions of
bribery, inquiring whether this or that voter has had a guinea when everybody
knows that the seats have been sold wholesale. Wait for wisdom and conscience in
public agents - fiddlestick! The only conscience we can trust to is the massive
sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom that will work is the wisdom of
balancing claims. That's my text - which side is injured? I support the man who
supports their claims; not the virtuous upholder of the wrong.«
    »That general talk about a particular case is mere question-begging,
Ladislaw. When I say, I go in for the dose that cures, it doesn't follow that I
go in for opium in a given case of gout.«
    »I am not begging the question we are upon - whether we are to try for
nothing till we find immaculate men to work with. Should you go on that plan? If
there were one man who would carry you a
