all sorts of circumstances, have made themselves a great power in the world:
they are turning the wheels of engines that will help to change most things. But
no engines would have done, if there had been false notions about the way water
would act. Now, all the schemes about voting, and districts, and annual
parliaments, and the rest, are engines, and the water or steam - the force that
is to work them - must come out of human nature - out of men's passions,
feelings, desires. Whether the engines will do good work or bad depends on these
feelings; and if we have false expectations about men's characters, we are very
much like the idiot who thinks he'll carry milk in a can without a bottom. In my
opinion, the notions about what mere voting will do are very much of that sort.«
    »That's very fine,« said a man in dirty fustian, with a scornful laugh. »But
how are we to get the power without votes?«
    »I'll tell you what's the greatest power under heaven,« said Felix, »and
that is public opinion - the ruling belief in society about what is right and
what is wrong, what is honourable and what is shameful. That's the steam that is
to work the engines. How can political freedom make us better, any more than a
religion we don't believe in, if people laugh and wink when they see men abuse
and defile it? And while public opinion is what it is - while men have no better
beliefs about public duty - while corruption is not felt to be a damning
disgrace - while men are not ashamed in parliament and out of it to make public
questions which concern the welfare of millions a mere screen for their own
petty private ends, - I say, no fresh scheme of voting will much mend our
condition. For, take us working men of all sorts. Suppose out of every hundred
who had a vote there were thirty who had some soberness, some sense to choose
with, some good feeling to make them wish the right thing for all. And suppose
there were seventy out of the hundred who were, half of them, not sober, who had
no sense to choose one thing in politics more than another, and who had so
little good feeling in them that they wasted on their own drinking the money
that should have helped to feed and clothe their wives and children; and another
half of them who, if they didn't drink, were too