an are readied it is _not_ the greatest privilege of the man to throw
mutton chops to dogs and make piles of empty champagne bottles. It might
almost be said that one cause of the former extravagance and the recent
distress and turbulence of the working classes is the absence of an ideal
from their minds.

Besides this moral apathy, the cottager too often assumes an attitude
distinctly antagonistic to every species of authority, and particularly to
that _prestige_ hitherto attached to property. Each man is a law to
himself, and does that which seems good in his own eyes. He does not pause
to ask himself, What will my neighbour think of this? He simply thinks of
no one but himself, takes counsel of no one, and cares not what the result
may be. It is the same in little things as great. Respect for authority is
extinct. The modern progressive cottager is perfectly certain that he
knows as much as his immediate employer, the squire, and the parson put
together with the experience of the world at their back. He is now the
judge--the infallible authority himself. He is wiser far than all the
learned and the thoughtful, wiser than the prophets themselves. Priest,
politician, and philosopher must bow their heads and listen to the dictum
of the ploughman.

This feeling shows itself most strikingly in the disregard of property.
There used to be a certain tacit agreement among all men that those who
possessed capital, rank, or reputation should be treated with courtesy.
That courtesy did not imply that the landowner, the capitalist, or the
minister of religion, was necessarily in himself superior. But it did
imply that those who administered property really represented the general
order in which all were interested. So in a court of justice, all who
enter remove their hats, not out of servile adulation of the person in
authority, but from respect for the majesty of the law, which it is every
individual's interest to uphold. But now, metaphorically speaking, the
labourer removes his hat for no man. Whether in the case of a manufacturer
or of a tenant of a thousand-acre farm the thing is the same. The cottager
can scarcely nod his employer a common greeting in the morning. Courtesy
is no longer practised. The idea in the man's mind appears to be to
express contempt for big employer's property. It is an unpleasant symptom.

At present it is not, however, an active, but a passive force; a moral
_vis inertiae_. Here again the clergyma