y strike, a curious sense of social and
political instability, and the first beginnings of the bishop's ill
health.

(4)

There came a day of exceptional fatigue and significance.

The industrial trouble was a very real distress to the bishop. He had
a firm belief that it is a function of the church to act as mediator
between employer and employed. It was a common saying of his that the
aim of socialism--the right sort of socialism--was to Christianize
employment. Regardless of suspicion on either hand, regardless of
very distinct hints that he should "mind his own business," he exerted
himself in a search for methods of reconciliation. He sought out every
one who seemed likely to be influential on either side, and did his
utmost to discover the conditions of a settlement. As far as possible
and with the help of a not very efficient chaplain he tried to combine
such interviews with his more normal visiting.

At times, and this was particularly the case on this day, he seemed to
be discovering nothing but the incurable perversity and militancy of
human nature. It was a day under an east wind, when a steely-blue sky
full of colourless light filled a stiff-necked world with whitish high
lights and inky shadows. These bright harsh days of barometric high
pressure in England rouse and thwart every expectation of the happiness
of spring. And as the bishop drove through the afternoon in a hired
fly along a rutted road of slag between fields that were bitterly wired
against the Sunday trespasser, he fell into a despondent meditation upon
the political and social outlook.

His thoughts were of a sort not uncommon in those days. The world was
strangely restless. Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had
been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some
compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people's ideas,
and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow. Not that Queen
Victoria had really been a paper-weight or any weight at all, but
it happened that she died as an epoch closed, an epoch of tremendous
stabilities. Her son, already elderly, had followed as the selvedge
follows the piece, he had passed and left the new age stripped bare.
In nearly every department of economic and social life now there was
upheaval, and it was an upheaval very different in character from the
radicalism and liberalism of the Victorian days. There were not only
doubt and denial, but now ther