Shirley

measured terms did he express his opinion on the transaction of the night: Moore, the magistrates, the soldiers, the mob-leaders, each and all came in for a share of his invectives; but he reserved his strongest epithets – and real, racy Yorkshire Doric adjectives they were – for the benefit of the fighting parsons, the »sanguinary, demoniac« rector and curate. According to him, the cup of ecclesiastical guilt was now full indeed.
    »The Church,« he said, »was in a bonnie pickle now: it was time it came down when parsons took to swaggering amang soldiers, blazing away wi' bullet and gunpowder, taking the lives of far honester men than themselves.«
    »What would Moore have done, if nobody had helped him?« asked Shirley.
    »Drunk as he'd brewed – eaten as he d baked.«
    »Which means, you would have left him by himself to face that mob. Good. He has plenty of courage; but the greatest amount of gallantry that ever garrisoned one human breast could scarce avail against two hundred.«
    »He had the soldiers; those poor slaves who hire out their own blood and spill other folks for money.«
    »You abuse soldiers almost as much as you abuse clergymen. All who wear red coats are national refuse in your eyes, and all who wear black are national swindlers. Mr. Moore, according to you, did wrong to get military aid, and he did still worse to accept of any other aid. Your way of talking amounts to this: – he should have abandoned his mill and his life to the rage of a set of misguided madmen, and Mr. Helstone and every other gentleman in the parish should have looked on, and seen the building razed and its owner slaughtered, and never stirred a finger to save either.«
    »If Moore had behaved to his men from the beginning as a master ought to behave, they never would have entertained their present feelings towards him.«
    »Easy for you to talk,« exclaimed Miss Keeldar, who was beginning to wax warm in her tenant's cause: »you, whose family have lived at Briarmains for six generations, to whose person the people have been accustomed for fifty years, who know all their ways, prejudices, and preferences. Easy, indeed, for
you
to act so as to avoid offending them; but Mr. Moore came a stranger into the district: he came here poor and friendless, with nothing but his own energies to back him; nothing but his honour, his talent, and his industry to make his way for him. A monstrous crime indeed that, under such circumstances, he could not popularize his naturally grave, quiet manners, all at once: could not be jocular, and free, and cordial with a strange peasantry, as you are with your fellow-townsmen! An unpardonable transgression, that when he introduced improvements he did not go about the business in quite the most politic way; did not graduate his changes as delicately as a rich capitalist might have done! For errors of this sort is he to be the victim of mob-outrage? Is he to be denied even the privilege of defending himself? Are those who have the hearts of men in their breasts (and Mr. Helstone – say what you will of him – has such a heart) to be reviled like malefactors because they stand by him – because they venture to espouse the cause of one against two hundred?«
    »Come – come now – be cool,« said Mr. Yorke, smiling at the earnestness with which Shirley multiplied her rapid questions.
    »Cool! Must I listen coolly to downright nonsense – to dangerous nonsense? No. I like you very well, Mr. Yorke, as you know; but I thoroughly dislike some of your principles. All that cant – excuse me, but I repeat the word – all that
cant
about soldiers and parsons is most offensive in my ears. All ridiculous, irrational crying up of one class, whether the same be aristocrat or democrat – all howling down of another class, whether clerical or military – all exacting injustice to individuals, whether monarch or mendicant – is really sickening to me: all arraying of ranks against ranks, all party hatreds, all tyrannies disguised as liberties, I reject and wash my hands of.
You
think you are a philanthropist;
you
think you are an advocate of liberty; but I will tell you this – Mr. Hall, the parson of Nunnely, is a better friend both of man and freedom, than Hiram Yorke, the Reformer of Briarfield.«
    From a man, Mr. Yorke would not have borne this language very patiently, nor would he have endured it from some women; but he accounted Shirley both honest and pretty, and her plain-spoken ire amused