towards the country's ruin, there was the more need for others to hang
on behind and get the wheels to stick if possible. In Treby, as elsewhere,
people were told they must rally at the coming election; but there was now a
large number of waverers - men of flexible, practical minds, who were not such
bigots as to cling to any views when a good tangible reason could be urged
against them; while some regarded it as the most neighbourly thing to hold a
little with both sides, and were not sure that they should rally or vote at all.
It seemed an invidious thing to vote for one gentleman rather than another.
    These social changes in Treby parish are comparatively public matters, and
this history is chiefly concerned with the private lot of a few men and women;
but there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public
life, from the time when the primeval milkmaid had to wander with the wanderings
of her clan, because the cow she milked was one of a herd which had made the
pastures bare. Even in that conservatory existence where the fair Camelia is
sighed for by the noble young Pineapple, neither of them needing to care about
the frost or rain outside, there is a nether apparatus of hot-water pipes liable
to cool down on a strike of the gardeners or a scarcity of coal. And the lives
we are about to look back upon do not belong to those conservatory species; they
are rooted in the common earth, having to endure all the ordinary chances of
past and present weather. As to the weather of 1832, the Zadkiel of that time
had predicted that the electrical condition of the clouds in the political
hemisphere would produce unusual perturbations in organic existence, and he
would perhaps have seen a fulfilment of his remarkable prophecy in that mutual
influence of dissimilar destinies which we shall see gradually unfolding itself.
For if the mixed political conditions of Treby Magna had not been acted on by
the passing of the Reform Bill, Mr Harold Transome would not have presented
himself as a candidate for North Loamshire, Treby would not have been a
polling-place, Mr Matthew Jermyn would not have been on affable terms with a
Dissenting preacher and his flock, and the venerable town would not have been
placarded with handbills, more or less complimentary and retrospective -
conditions in this case essential to the where and the what, without which, as
the learned know, there can be no event whatever.
    For example, it was through these conditions that a young man named Felix
Holt made a considerable difference in the life of Harold Transome, though