me on us, and what of the loyalty now paying
its hundreds of thousands, and howling down questioners! In a day
of bankruptcies, how much would you bid for the loyalty of a class
shivering under deprivation of luxuries, with its God Comfort beggared?
Ay, my Beauchamp,"--the most offensive thing to me is that "my
Beauchamp," but old Nevil has evidently given himself up hand and
foot to this ruffian--"ay, when you reflect that fear of the so-called
rabble, i.e. the people, the unmoneyed class, which knows not Comfort,
tastes not of luxuries, is the main component of their noisy frigid
loyalty, and that the people are not with them but against, and yet
that the people might be won by visible forthright kingly service to a
loyalty outdoing theirs as the sun the moon; ay, that the people verily
thirst to love and reverence; and that their love is the only love worth
having, because it is disinterested love, and endures, and takes heat in
adversity,--reflect on it and wonder at the inversion of things! So
with a Church. It lives if it is at home with the poor. In the arms of
enriched shopkeepers it rots, goes to decay in vestments--vestments!
flakes of mummy-wraps for it! or else they use it for one of their
political truncheons--to awe the ignorant masses: I quote them. So. Not
much ahead of ancient Egyptians in spirituality or in priestcraft! They
call it statesmanship. O for a word for it! Let Palsy and Cunning go to
form a word. Deadmanship, I call it."--To quote my uncle the baron, this
is lunatic dribble!--"Parsons and princes are happy with the homage of
this huge passive fleshpot class. It is enough for them. Why not? The
taxes are paid and the tithes. Whilst commercial prosperity lasts!"'

Colonel Halkett threw his arms aloft.

'"Meanwhile, note this: the people are the Power to come.
Oppressed, unprotected, abandoned; left to the ebb and flow of the
tides of the market, now taken on to work, now cast off to starve,
committed to the shifting laws of demand and supply, slaves of
Capital-the whited name for old accursed. Mammon: and of all the
ranked and black-uniformed host no pastor to come out of the
association of shepherds, and proclaim before heaven and man the
primary claim of their cause; they are, I say, the power, worth the
seduction of by another Power not mighty in England now: and likely
in time to set up yet another Power not existing in England now.
What if a passive comf