other night in High Street. All sorts of people, every sort of person,
lent a hand in putting it out. And that frightful railway disaster at
Aisgill; all sorts of people worked together in rescuing. No one stopped
to ask whether the passengers were first class or third. Well, that's
the sort of thing that gets me. Fire and disaster--those are facts and
everybody gets to and deals with them. And if there was a big war
everybody would get to and fight it. And yet all these political and
social things are just as much facts that affect everybody, and all
anybody can do is to shout and smash up the other man's rights in them.
They all do it--in everything. Religion's as bad as any--worse. Here's
one of these bishops saying he can't countenance Churchmen preaching in
chapels or dissenters being invited to preach in churches because the
Church must stand by the rock principles of its creed, and to preach in
a chapel would mean politely not touching on those principles. You'd
think heaven didn't come into the business at all. And you'd think that
life doesn't come into the business of living at all. All smashing....
Well, I can't stick shouting and I can't stick smashing."

IV

Something of these views he one day expressed to Pike, the Editor of the
_Tidborough County Times_. He was taken into the _County Times_ office
by business connected with an error in the firm's standing account for
advertisement notices and, encountering Pike outside his room, entered
with him and talked.

Pike was a man of nearly sixty with furiously black and luxuriant hair.
He had been every sort of journalist in America and in London, and some
years previously had been brought into the editorship of the _County
Times_. The Press, broad-based on the liberty of the English people and
superbly impervious to whatever temptation to jump in the direction the
cat jumps, is, on the other hand, singularly sensitive to apparently
inconsequent trifles in the lives of its proprietary. Pike, with his
reputation, was brought into the editorship of the _County Times_ solely
because the proprietor late in life suddenly married. The wife of the
proprietor desiring to share a knighthood with her husband, the
proprietor, anxious to please but unwilling to pay, incontinently sacked
the tame editor who was beguiling an amiable dotage with the _County
Times_ and looked about for a wild editor, whom unquestionably he found
in Mr. Pike.

The breath of the _County Tim