A Little Dickens on Romney vs. the 47%

You may recall that last month I touted here the genius and prescience of Charles Dickens' Hard Times.  Now here's David Frum today with this quote from the book, which portrays the owners of the factories in smog-ridden Coketown who have destroyed so many workers there:

Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. ...They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke. ...

Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used - that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts - he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would 'sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.' This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.

However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it. So there it was, in the haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied.