This feeling shows itself most strikingly in the disregard of property.  There used to be a certain tacit agreement among all men that those who possessed capital, rank, or reputation should be treated with courtesy.  That courtesy did not imply that the landowner, the capitalist, or the minister of religion, was necessarily in himself superior.  But it did imply that those who administered property really represented the general order in which all were interested.  So in a court of justice, all who enter remove their hats, not out of servile adulation of the person in authority, but from respect for the majesty of the law, which it is every individual’s interest to uphold.  But now, metaphorically speaking, the labourer removes his hat for no man.  Whether in the case of a manufacturer or of a tenant of a thousand-acre farm the thing is the same.  The cottager can scarcely nod his employer a common greeting in the morning.  Courtesy is no longer practised.  The idea in the man’s mind appears to be to express contempt for big employer’s property.  It is an unpleasant symptom.

At present it is not, however, an active, but a passive force; a moral vis inertiae.  Here again the clergyman meets with a cold rebuff.  No eloquence, persuasion, personal influence even, can produce more than a passing impression.  But here again, perhaps, his practical activity may bring about its reaction.  In time the cottager will be compelled to admit that, at least, coal club, benefit society, cricket, allotment, &c., have done him no harm.  In time he may even see that property and authority are not always entirely selfish—­that they may do good, and be worthy, at all events, of courteous acknowledgment.

These two characteristics, moral apathy and contempt of property—­i.e., of social order—­are probably exercising considerable influence in shaping the labourer’s future.  Free of mental restraint, his own will must work its way for good or evil.  It is true that the rise or fall of wages may check or hasten the development of that future.  In either case it is not, however, probable that he will return to the old grooves; indeed, the grooves themselves are gone, and the logic of events must force him to move onwards.  That motion, in its turn, must affect the rest of the community.  Let the mind’s eye glance for a moment over the country at large.  The villages among the hills, the villages on the plains, in the valleys, and beside the streams represent in the aggregate an enormous power.  Separately such hamlets seem small and feeble—­unable to impress their will upon the world.  But together they contain a vast crowd, which, united, may shoulder itself an irresistible course, pushing aside all obstacles by mere physical weight.