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"No, I can't say I do."

"Do want about a hundred thousand pensioned paupers picking your pocket of five-and-twenty million a year to live in luxury, and keep their carriages, and drive slap over you, and think nothing of it, if you don't get out of the way? Do you want them?"

"Certainly not."

"Very well, then. If you were the people, and you wouldn't want them, why should the people want them now?"

"That's feasible: certainly, that's feasible."

"Feasible! Doesn't it stand to reason?"

"I must say it does."

"The thing, you see, only wants a little fructification in a simplified manner for every soul on earth to understand it. I'd undertake to make it clear to the meanest capacity; but then you see I can't travel about the country to open the eyes of the universal people, and the consequence is, they're on that important subject sand blind. They listen to parsons: what's the good of that? Is there a parson in all flesh who'll tell them what I've told you now? Not a bit of it. They know better. They know that if they were to fructify the ideas of the people in that way, it would open their eyes, and their object is to keep their eyes closed to all the abuses, and all the swindles, and all the corrupt dead robberies of those who live upon the sweat of the poor man's brow. Oh! it's shocking when you come to look at the ignorance of the people—boney fidely shocking! If Billy the Conqueror could rise from his grave and talk over the matter with Peter the Great, they'd be right down astonished to find what the people—the ignorant people—will bear."

"There's a good deal of ignorance about, I dare say," observed Pokey. "No doubt there's a good deal of ignorance."

"A good deal of ignorance. It's stunning! Why, look at the lot of locusts now preying upon our vitals! Only look at them, and see what they cost! Will any man tell me that, if all those disgusting sums of money which they swallow up were in the pockets of the people, they wouldn't be better off? Don't it stand to reason, that if one man has five hundred thousand a year, and five thousand men, as good as he is, have nothing, the five thousand men would have a hundred a year each, if that money were equally divided?"

"Yes: that's clear enough."

"Clear enough! I believe you. It is clear enough: and yet the people can't see this. They can't see how they are plundered and oppressed, and rode rough-shod over, and trodden under foot. Not a bit of it. Their ignorant ideas don't fructify in that way. Besides, do you think that if I were the people, I'd suffer myself to be ground to the earth by any such thing as a National Debt?"

"Certainly," said Pokey, "that ought to be paid off."

"Paid off! Do you know what you're talking about? Paid off! Send I may live! Why, do you know that if you take five hundred millions of miles of ground and cover it over with fifty-pound notes, you would not have enough, even then, to pay it off? I've seen it calculated: so there can be no mistake about that. Pave Europe with sovereigns