Think not it was all pure oxygen that the panting lip drew in.
No; there were still those inflammatory tracts.

Political I do not like to call them, for politics means the art of government, and the tracts I speak of assailed all government which mankind has hitherto recognized.
Sad rubbish, perhaps, were such tracts to you, O sound thinker, in your easy-chair! or to you, practised statesman, at your post on the Treasury Bench; to you, calm dignitary of a learned Church; or to you, my lord judge, who may often have sent from your bar to the dire Orcus of Norfolk's Isle the ghosts of men whom that rubbish, falling simultaneously on the bumps of acquisitiveness and combativeness, hath untimely slain! Sad rubbish to you! But seems it such rubbish to the poor man, to whom it promises a paradise on the easy terms of upsetting a world?
For, ye see, those "Appeals to Operatives" represent that same world-upsetting as the simplest thing imaginable,--a sort of two-and-two-make-four proposition.

The poor have only got to set their strong hands to the axle, and heave-a-boy! and hurrah for the topsy-turvy! Then just to put a little wholesome rage into the heave-a-hoy! it is so facile to accompany the eloquence of "Appeals" with a kind of stir-the-bile-up statistics,--"Abuses of the aristocracy," "Jobs of the Priesthood," "Expenses of the Army kept up for Peers' younger sons," "Wars contracted for the villanous purpose of raising the rents of the landowners,"-- all arithmetically dished up, and seasoned with tales of every gentleman who has committed a misdeed, every clergyman who has dishonoured his cloth; as if such instances were fair specimens of average gentlemen and ministers of religion! All this, passionately advanced (and, observe, never answered, for that literature admits no controversialists, and the writer has it all his own way), may be rubbish; but it is out of such rubbish that operatives build barricades for attack, and legislators prisons for defence.
Our poor friend Lenny drew plenty of this stuff from the tinker's bag.

He thought it very clever and very eloquent; and he supposed the statistics were as true as mathematical demonstrations.
A famous knowledge-diffuser is looking over my shoulder, and tells me, "Increase education, and cheapen good books, and all this rubbish will disappear!" Sir, I don't believe a word of it.

If you printed Ricardo and Adam Smith at a farthing a volume, I still believe that they would be as little read by the operatives as they are nowadays by a very large proportion of highly-cultivated men.