VI.] KEEPING PIG8. 95 



as pretty as ladies ? Oh, yes ! (bless their rosy cheeks 

 and white teeth !) and a great deal prettier too ! But 

 are they less pretty, when their dress is plain and 

 substantial, and when the natural presumption is, 

 that they have smocks as well as gowns, than they 

 are when drawn off in the frail fabric of Sir Robert 

 Peel,* "where tawdry colours strive with dirty white," 

 exciting violent suspicions that all is not as it ought 

 to be nearer the skin, and calling up a train of ideas 

 extremely hostile to that sort of feeling which every 

 lass innocently and commendably wishes to awaken 

 in her male beholders? Are they prettiest when they 

 come through the wet and dirt safe and neat; or when 

 their draggled dress is plastered to their backs by a 

 shower of rain ? However, the fault has not been 

 theirs, nor that of their parents. It is the system of 

 managing the affairs of the nation. This system 

 has made all flashy and false, and has put all things 

 out of their place. Pomposity, bombast, hyperbole, 

 redundancy, and obscurity, both in speaking and in 

 writing ; mock-delicacy in manners ; mock-liberality, 

 mock-humanity, and mock-religion. Pitt's false mo- 

 ney, Peel's flimsy dresses, Wilberforce's potatoe diet, 

 Castlereagh's and Mackintosh's oratory, Walter 

 Scott's poems, Walter's and Stoddart'sf paragraphs, 

 with all the bad taste and baseness and hypocrisy 

 which they spread over this country; all have arisen, 

 grown, branched out, bloomed, and borne together ; 

 and we are now beginning to taste of their fruit. But, 

 as the fat of the adder is, as is said, the antidote to 

 its sting ; so in the Son of the great worker of Spinning- 

 Jennies, we have, thanks to the Proctors and Doctors 

 of Oxford, the author of that Bill, before which this 

 false, this flashy, this flimsy, this rotten system will 

 dissolve as one of his father's pasted calicoes does at 

 the sight of the washing-tub. 



133. " What," says the cottager, "has all this to do 

 with hogs and bacon ?" Not directly with hogs and 



* The father of the present Sir Robert Peel, who gained his fortune as 

 a cotton weaver by the help of machinery. 



* Editors of the Ixmdon Times Newspaper. 



