the only child
and heir, and as it were sole owner of the shoulders on which must
some day devolve the mantle of Booby and Moggs. Booby had long been
gathered to his fathers, and old Moggs was the stern opponent of
strikes. What he had lost by absolutely refusing to yield a point
during the last strike among the shoemakers of London no one could
tell. He had professed aloud that he would sooner be ruined, sooner
give up his country residence at Shepherd's Bush, sooner pull down
the honoured names of Booby and Moggs from over the shop-window in
Old Bond Street, than allow himself to be driven half an inch out
of his course by men who were attempting to dictate to him what he
should do with his own. In these days of strikes Moggs would look
even upon his own workmen with the eyes of a Coriolanus glaring upon
the disaffected populace of Rome. Mr. Moggs senior would stand at his
shop-door, with his hand within his waistcoat, watching the men out
on strike who were picketing the streets round his shop, and would
feel himself every inch a patrician, ready to die for his order. Such
was Moggs senior. And Moggs junior, who was a child of Capital, but
whose heirship depended entirely on his father's will, harangued his
father's workmen and other workmen at the Cheshire Cheese, telling
them that Labour was the salt of the earth, and that Capital was
the foe to Labour! Of course they loved him. The demagogue who
is of all demagogues the most popular, is the demagogue who is a
demagogue in opposition to his apparent nature. The radical Earl,
the free-thinking parson, the squire who won't preserve, the tenant
who defies his landlord, the capitalist with a theory for dividing
profits, the Moggs who loves a strike,--these are the men whom the
working men delight to follow. Ontario Moggs, who was at any rate
honest in his philanthropy, and who did in truth believe that it was
better that twenty real bootmakers should eat beef daily than that
one so-called bootmaker should live in a country residence,--who
believed this and acted on his belief, though he was himself not
of the twenty, but rather the one so-called bootmaker who would
suffer by the propagation of such a creed,--was beloved and almost
worshipped by the denizens of the Cheshire Cheese. How far the real
philanthropy of the man may have been marred by an uneasy and fatuous
ambition; how far he was carried away by a feeling that it was better
to make speeches at the Cheshire C