We do not trust the working man.  We have given over to him the whole of the power.  All the power there is we have given to him, because he stands in an enormous majority.  We have made him absolute master of this realm of Great Britain and Ireland.  What could we do more for a man whom we blindly and implicitly trusted?  Yet the working man, for whom we have done so much, we have not yet begun to trust.

SUNDAY MORNING IN THE CITY

On Saturday afternoon, when the last of the clerks bangs the great door behind him and steps out of the office on his way home; when the shutters of the warehouses are at last all closed; there falls upon the street a silence and loneliness which lasts from three o’clock on Saturday till eight o’clock on Monday—­a sleep unbroken for forty-one long hours.  In the main arteries, it is true, there is always a little life; the tramp of feet never ceases day or night in Fleet Street or Cheapside.  But in all the narrow streets branching north and south, east and west, of the great thoroughfares there is silence—­there is sleep.  This Sabbath of forty hours’ duration is absolutely unparalleled in any other City of the world.  There is no other place, there never has been any other place, in which not only work ceases, but where the workers also disappear.  In that far-off City of the Rabbis called Sambatyon, where live the descendants of the Ten Tribes, the river which surrounds and protects the City with its broad and mighty flood, too strong for boats to cross, ceases to flow on the Sabbath; but it is not pretended that the people cease to live there.  Of no other City can it be said that it sleeps from Saturday night till Monday morning.

An attempt is made to awaken the City every Sunday morning when the bells begin to ring, and there is as great and joyful a ringing from every church tower or steeple as if the bells were calling the faithful, as of old, by the hundred thousand; they go on ringing because it is their duty; they were hung up there for no other purpose; hidden away in the towers, they do not know that the people have all gone away, and that they ring to empty houses and deserted streets.  For there is no response.  At most one may see a solitary figure dressed in black stuff creeping stealthily along like a ghost on her way from the empty house to the empty church.  When the bells leave off silence falls again, there is no one in the street.  One’s own footsteps echo from the wall; we walk along in a dream; old words and old rhymes crowd into the brain.  It is a dead City—­a City newly dead—­we are gazing upon the dead.

  Life and thought have gone away
    Side by side. 
  All within is dark as night. 
  In the windows is no light;
  And no murmur at the door
  So frequent on its hinge before.