uch grief when it had to get itself defined.
Hardy was particularly given to persecution on this subject, when
he could get Tom, and, perhaps, one or two others, in a quiet
room by themselves. While professing the utmost sympathy for "the
good cause," and a hope as strong as theirs that all its enemies
might find themselves suspended to lamp-posts as soon as
possible, he would pursue it into corners from which escape was
most difficult, asking it and its supporters what it exactly was,
and driving them from one cloud-land to another, and from "the
good cause" to the "people's cause," the "cause of labor," and
other like troublesome definitions, until the great idea seemed
to have no shape or existence any longer even in their own
brains.

But Hardy's persecution, provoking as it was for the time, never
went to the undermining of any real conviction in the minds of
his juniors, or the shaking of anything which did not need
shaking, but only helped them to clear their ideas and brains as
to what they were talking and thinking about, and gave them
glimpses--soon clouded over again, but most useful,
nevertheless--of the truth; that there were a good many knotty
questions to be solved before a man could be quite sure that he
had found out the way to set the world thoroughly to rights, and
heal all the ills that flesh is heir to.

Hardy treated another of his friend's most favorite notions even
with less respect than this one of "the good cause." Democracy,
that "universal democracy," which their favourite author had
recently declared to be "an inevitable fact of the days in which
we live", was, perhaps, on the whole, the pet idea of the small
section of liberal young Oxford, with whom Tom was now hand and
glove. They lost no opportunity of worshipping it, and doing
battle for it; and, indeed, most of them did very truly believe
that that state of the world which this universal democracy was
to bring about, and which was coming no man could say how soon,
was to be in fact that age of peace and good-will which men had
dreamt of in all times, when the lion should lie down with the
kid, and nation should not vex nation any more.

After hearing something to this effect from Tom on several
occasions, Hardy cunningly lured him to his rooms on the pretence
of talking over the prospects of the boat club, and then, having
seated him by the fire, which he himself proceeded to assault
gently with the poker, propounded suddenly to