small circumference yield a quick swing; the concern of the average
intelligent Englishman as to the consolidation of his country's
interests in the Yangtse Valley would be a languid manifestation beside
that of an Elgin elector in the chances of an appropriation for a
new court house. The single mind is the most fervid: Elgin had few
distractions from the question of the court house or the branch line
to Clayfield. The arts conspired to be absent; letters resided at the
nearest university city; science was imported as required, in practical
improvements. There was nothing, indeed, to interfere with Elgin's
attention to the immediate, the vital, the municipal: one might almost
read this concentration of interest in the white dust of the rambling
streets, and the shutters closed against it. Like other movements of the
single mind, it had something of the ferocious, of the inflexible, of
the unintelligent; but it proudly wore the character of the go-ahead
and, as Walter Winter would have pointed out to you, it had granted
eleven bonuses to "capture" sound commercial concerns in six years.

In wholesome fear of mistake, one would hesitate to put church matters
either before or after politics among the preoccupations of Elgin. It
would be safer and more indisputable to say that nothing compared with
religion but politics, and nothing compared with politics but religion.
In offering this proposition also we must think of our dimensions. There
is a religious fervour in Oxford, in Mecca, in Benares, and the sign
for these ideas is the same; we have to apply ourselves to the
interpretation. In Elgin religious fervour was not beautiful, or
dramatic, or self-immolating; it was reasonable. You were perhaps
your own first creditor; after that your debt was to your Maker. You
discharged this obligation in a spirit of sturdy equity: if the children
didn't go to Sunday school you knew the reason why. The habit of church
attendance was not only a basis of respectability, but practically the
only one: a person who was "never known to put his head inside a church
door" could not be more severely reprobated, by Mrs Murchison at all
events. It was the normal thing, the thing which formed the backbone of
life, sustaining to the serious, impressive to the light, indispensable
to the rest, and the thing that was more than any of these, which you
can only know when you stand in the churches among the congregations.
Within its prescribed limita