At this little homestead there were five men, whose savings would have
enabled them to have taken farms, if they could have met with suitable
girls as wives; and they pretty plainly animadverted upon the policy of
those whom they considered the proper persons to have rectified their
grievances. One remarked, “What does Lord Stanley care, so that he has a
wife himself!”
“Ah!” responded another; “and Peel, with all his great speeches, never
said a single word about wives for us.”
“Lord John Russell, too,” said Tom Slaney, “seems just as bad as the
rest. What does he think we’re made of? wood, or stone, or dried
biscuit?”
“It ought to be properly represented to Earl Grey,” observed the fourth.
“Do they call this looking after a young colony? Has nobody no sense?”
“Yes,” replied the most sensitive of the party, “the _Queen_ ought to
know it,—it is a cruel shame.”