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 there were also impatience and unreason.  People argued less and acted quicker.  There was a pride in rebellion for its own sake, an indiscipline and disposition to sporadic violence that made it extremely hard to negotiate any reconciliations or compromises.  Behind every extremist it seemed stood a further extremist prepared to go one better....

The bishop had spent most of the morning with one of the big employers, a tall dark man, lean and nervous, and obviously tired and worried by the struggle.  He did not conceal his opinion that the church was meddling with matters quite outside its sphere.  Never had it been conveyed to the bishop before how remote a rich and established Englishman could consider the church from reality.

“You’ve got no hold on them,” he said.  “It isn’t your sphere.”

And again:  “They’ll listen to you—­if you speak well.  But they don’t believe you know anything about it, and they don’t trust your good intentions.  They won’t mind a bit what you say unless you drop something they can use against us.”

The bishop tried a few phrases.  He thought there might be something in co-operation, in profit-sharing, in some more permanent relationship between the business and the employee.

“There isn’t,” said the employer compactly.  “It’s just the malice of being inferior against the man in control.  It’s just the spirit of insubordination and boredom with duty.  This trouble’s as old as the Devil.”