Yet people tell me that those were very benighted Tory days I am regretting. Wakefield was held to be a Tory place, given up hand and foot to the magnates who owned the great estate around. I know how, when a small thing in frilled slops, but with my bosom full of patriotic pride in our town, I used to feel bitterly depressed at hearing a rising Radical Leeds clothier, who came to see us sometimes, denounce Wakefield as a 'one-eyed hoil,' his emphatic way of indicating our want of sweep of vision. I remember he generally capped his arguments by demanding, in sonorous tones, if any men worthy of the name of Britons would put up with that 'obsolete monopoly' of the (soke)[1] mills.
To tell the truth, I am afraid that we felt a good deal of mean-spirited admiration for the neighbouring squires and lords on the occasions when they showed themselves and their handsome carriages in our streets: but at least the Wentworths and Pilkingtons and Squire Waterton were gentlemen and scholars; our new magnates have nothing to boast of but their money. It seems to me better that people should boast of the old oaks of Walton, and the old pictures of ——— Priory, than tell how many thousands an iron lord made by the last rise in iron: and that is what they talk of now. And if the iron kings have supplanted the landlords, they are not any more free. The old farmers might vote blindly out of blind respect for the old landlords; but is it not better than the newly-enfranchised puddlers and strikers selling votes openly for the price of a gallon of whisky? We have lost a good deal, although we are long rid of the soke monopoly, which used to be a standing reproach to us. I think that the town bought off the soke just after the Corn Law agitation, when the great railways began to enclose the wide meadows about the town with their ugly ramparts and arches, where the trains keep up a continual scream.
- ↑ I don't know what this word means, and may have mistaken the reading of it.
