You was always at it--if not with your right hand, with your left. What
was they a doing in the Yard? Why, take a look at 'em and see. There
was the girls and their mothers a working at their sewing, or their
shoe-binding, or their trimming, or their waistcoat making, day and
night and night and day, and not more than able to keep body and soul
together after all--often not so much. There was people of pretty well
all sorts of trades you could name, all wanting to work, and yet not
able to get it.
There was old people, after working all their lives,
going and being shut up in the workhouse, much worse fed and lodged and
treated altogether, than--Mr Plornish said manufacturers, but appeared
to mean malefactors. Why, a man didn't know where to turn himself for a
crumb of comfort. As to who was to blame for it, Mr Plornish didn't know
who was to blame for it. He could tell you who suffered, but he couldn't
tell you whose fault it was. It wasn't HIS place to find out, and who'd
mind what he said, if he did find out? He only know'd that it wasn't put
right by them what undertook that line of business, and that it didn't
come right of itself. And, in brief, his illogical opinion was, that if
you couldn't do nothing for him, you had better take nothing from him
for doing of it; so far as he could make out, that was about what it
come to.
Thus, in a prolix, gently-growling, foolish way, did Plornish
turn the tangled skein of his estate about and about, like a blind man
who was trying to find some beginning or end to it; until they reached
the prison gate. There, he left his Principal alone; to wonder, as he
rode away, how many thousand Plornishes there might be within a day
or two's journey of the Circumlocution Office, playing sundry curious
variations on the same tune, which were not known by ear in that
glorious institution.