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Wages will be as low and will fluctuate as much with you as with us. You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams, and in those Manchesters and Birminghams hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly be sometimes out of work. Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test.
All my old Oxford associations are gone. Oxford, instead of being, as it used to be, the magnificent old city of the seventeenth century, still preserving its antique character among the improvements of modern times, and exhibiting in the midst of upstart Birminghams and Manchesters the same aspect which it wore when Charles held his court at Christchurch, and Rupert led his cavalry over Magdalene Bridge, is now to me only the place where I was so happy with my little sisters.
The citizens of London assembled by tens of thousands to burn the Pope in effigy. The government posted cavalry at Temple Bar, and placed ordnance round Whitehall. In that year our tongue was enriched with two words, Mob and Sham, remarkable memorials of a season of tumult and imposture. Opponents of the court were called Birminghams, Petitioners, and Exclusionists.
Although I heard a deal of them; for everybody was talking, and ready to come to blows; if only it could be done without danger. But one said this, and one said that; and they talked so much about Birminghams, and Tantivies, and Whigs and Tories, and Protestant flails and such like, that I was only too glad to have my glass and clink my spoon for answer." "Right, John, thou art right as usual.
This was one grave cause of the English failure, but serious as it was, it would not have sufficed alone to explain the full extent of the evil. Some most powerful families rooted themselves in the soil, and never forsook it; the Geraldines, of Munster and Kildare; the Butlers, of Kilkenny; the De Burghs, the Birminghams, the De Courcies, and many others.
What would you think of eight Birminghams being transplanted from this country and set down in the United States? Speaking generally, every man of these two and a half millions is in a position of much higher comfort and prosperity than he would have been if he had remained in this country. I say it is the home of the working man; as one of her poets has recently said,
Also in Matthew Taubman's A Medley on the Plot, this stanza occurs: Confound the hypocrites, Birminghams royal, Who think allegiance a transgression; Since to oppose the King is counted loyal, And to rail high at the succession. Dryden in his Preface to Absalom and Achitophel, I, speaks of 'an Anti-Bromingham', i.e. a Tory. p. 100 dry bobs. A bob was a sarcastic jest or jibe. cf.
'His family were so civil to us when we were at Manchester. 'Manchester, indeed! said Coningsby; 'if you knew what I do about Manchester! A pretty state we have been in in London this week past with your Manchesters and Birminghams! 'Come, come, Coningsby, said Lord Vere, the son of a Whig minister; 'I am all for Manchester and Birmingham.
Walsh, not from the De Birminghams, who were lords justices in 1321 and 1348; but from Sir William Birmingham, who was imprisioned there in 1331, with his son Walter; "the former was taken out from thence and executed, the latter was pardoned as to life because he was in holy orders."
They boasted that their hardware was highly esteemed, not indeed as now, at Pekin and Lima, at Bokhara and Timbuctoo, but in London, and even as far off as Ireland. They had acquired a less honourable renown as coiners of bad money. In allusion to their spurious groats, some Tory wit had fixed on demagogues, who hypocritically affected zeal against Popery, the nickname of Birminghams.
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