-day opinion that praying
people are not practical,' those by whom it is entertained, of course,
mentally except praying Quakers.

The fact that insurance offices do not attempt to distinguish between
the prayerful and the prayerless, but, treating both classes as liable
to the same risks, exact from both the same premiums, proves, I submit,
nothing against the efficacy of prayer, not even that the managers of
insurance offices do not believe in it. The statement that prayerful and
prayerless, when placing their money in the same dishonest keeping, or
engaging in the same bad speculations, suffer losses, bearing exactly
the same proportion to their respective ventures, although most probably
quite true, is also one which Mr. Galton has neglected to verify by the
application to it of any test, scientific or other. Finally, if the
disasters of the Royal British Bank are to be ascribed to its custom of
opening business with prayer, not only ought the cackle of Convocation
to be attributed to a similar cause, but also all the legislative
botchery of the House of Commons, and the abolition of prayer before
debate should be treated as the most urgently needed of those further
parliamentary reforms with which the fertile brains of certain eminent
statesmen are suspected to be teeming.

Thus much by way of intimation that there would be no excessive temerity
in encountering Mr. Galton even on the ground of his own choosing, were
that ground really worth contending for. But baseless and exorbitant as
all Mr. Galton's postulates are, there is not one of them to which he
might not be made heartily welcome, for any effect its surrender could
have upon the real issue, the true nature whereof both Mr. Galton and
his principal coadjutor have, with marvellous sleight of eye, contrived
completely to overlook. Such Pharisees in science, such sticklers for
rigorously scientific method, might have been expected to begin by
authenticating the materials they proposed to operate upon, and, when
professing to experiment upon pure metal, at least to see that it was
not mere dross they were casting into the crucible. Plainly, however,
they despise any such nice distinctions. The most earnest prayer and the
emptiest ceremonial prate are both alike to them. What sort of a process
they imagine prayer to be may be at once perceived from the sort of
trials to which they desire to subject it.

'After much thought and examination,' the coadjutor afor