,
and united to a woman who seemed a complete contrast to Mary Cave in all
respects, he could not forget the great disappointment of his life; and when he
heard that what would have been so precious to him had been neglected, perhaps
abused by another, he conceived for that other a rooted and bitter animosity.
    Of the nature and strength of this animosity, Mr. Helstone was but half
aware: he neither knew how much Yorke had loved Mary Cave, what he had felt on
losing her, nor was he conscious of the calumnies concerning his treatment of
her, familiar to every ear in the neighbourhood but his own. He believed
political and religious differences alone separated him and Mr. Yorke; had he
known how the case really stood, he would hardly have been induced by any
persuasion to cross his former rival's threshold.
 
Mr. Yorke did not resume his lecture of Robert Moore; the conversation ere long
recommenced in a more general form, though still in a somewhat disputative tone.
The unquiet state of the country, the various depredations lately committed on
mill-property in the district, supplied abundant matter for disagreement;
especially as each of the three gentlemen present differed more or less in his
views on these subjects. Mr. Helstone thought the masters aggrieved, the
workpeople unreasonable; he condemned sweepingly the wide-spread spirit of
disaffection against constituted authorities, the growing indisposition to bear
with patience evils he regarded as inevitable: the cures he prescribed were
vigorous government interference, strict magisterial vigilance; when necessary,
prompt military coercion.
    Mr. Yorke wished to know whether this interference, vigilance, and coercion
would feed those who were hungry, give work to those who wanted work and whom no
man would hire. He scouted the idea of inevitable evils; he said public patience
was a camel, on whose back the last atom that could be borne had already been
laid, and that resistance was now a duty: the wide-spread spirit of disaffection
against constituted authorities, he regarded as the most promising sign of the
times; the masters, he allowed, were truly aggrieved, but their main grievances
had been heaped on them by a »corrupt, base, and bloody« government (these were
Mr. Yorke's epithets). Madmen like Pitt, demons like Castlereagh, mischievous
idiots like Perceval, were the tyrants, the curses of the country, the
destroyers of her trade. It was their infatuated perseverance in an
unjustifiable, a hopeless, a ruinous war, which had brought the nation to its
present pass. It was their monstrously oppressive taxation, it was the