940. Mary Russell Mitford to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 304.
Three Mile Cross
April 4, 1842.
I am an inconsistent politician, I confess it, with my aristocratic prejudices and my radical opinions. By-and-by, perhaps, when education is more diffused, these prejudices may lose their ground; at present there is certainly a great difference between the well-born, well-bred, simple, frank, and gentle people who had grandfathers, and the fine, fussy pretenders who have never known such progenitors. All the Whigs seem to me, in all their measures, afraid of the people—afraid to make any popular concession. Moore said once, in my hearing, that he “liked the Whigs when they were out of power.” And certainly they are better then. But even then they seem as if always guarding against whole measures—devoted to bit-by-bit legislation. If they had flung themselves upon the people heartily and honestly, they might have set the Tories at defiance. Free trade—that seems to me the one great want now; and I cannot but believe that we shall live to see the principles advocated by Grote and Warburton (neither of them now in Parliament), [1] in the ascendant. O’Connell is versatile in his words and ways, and the Repeal seems to me incomprehensible; [2] nevertheless, as an Irishman (for doubtless he looks upon us as the English enemy), I cannot but think him a great patriot. And if you had but to read all those dull speeches you would feel the relief of coming across his eloquence.
Ever your own,
M.R.M.
Text: L’Estrange (2), III, 143–144.
1. George Grote (1794–1871) agreed to stand for Parliament in 1831 to work for parliamentary reform, of which he was an early proponent. He remained a Member until 1841, when he declined to stand for re-election in order to devote himself to the completion of his 12-volume History of Greece, begun in 1822 and published in stages between 1846 and 1856. Henry Warburton (1784?–1858), philosopher and economist, was first returned to Parliament as a radical in 1826 but resigned his seat in 1841 when there was a suggestion that his agent might be implicated in charges of bribery. He was re-elected in 1843, but retired from political life in 1847, when all the reforms he had advocated had been effected.
2. In 1840, feeling that Parliament was not seriously addressing Ireland’s many problems, O’Connell had founded the Repeal Association with the object of working for the repeal of the Act of Union of 1801, which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; this was an issue he and his followers were still strenuously advocating.
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