Even proposals for mutual commercial
benefit may be underpinned, I am glad to say, by loftier
principles than those of the market-place and the
counting-house."
At this one of his hearers, unacquainted with the higher
commercial plane, exclaimed, "How be ye goin' to get 'em
kept to, then?"
Hesketh took up the question. He said a friend in the
audience asked how they were to ensure that such
arrangements would be adhered to. His answer was in the
words of the Duke of Dartmoor, "By the mutual esteem,
the inherent integrity, and the willing compromise of
the British race."
Here someone on the back benches, impatient, doubtless,
at his own incapacity to follow this high doctrine,
exclaimed intemperately, "Oh, shut up!" and the gathering,
remembering that this, after all, was not what it had
come for, began to hint that it had had enough in
intermittent stamps and uncompromising shouts for
"Murchison!"
Hesketh kept on his legs, however, a few minutes longer.
He had a trenchant sentence to repeat to them which he
thought they would take as a direct message from the
distinguished nobleman who had uttered it. The Marquis
of Aldeburgh was the father of the pithy thing, which he
had presented, as it happened, to Hesketh himself. The
audience received it with respect--Hesketh's own respect
was so marked--but with misapprehension; there had been
too many allusions to the nobility for a community so
far removed from its soothing influence.
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