’Yes, I say it seriously, Mrs. Waltham.  In the ordinary sense of the word, they have no religion.  The truth is, they have no time to think of it.’

‘Oh, but surely it needs no thought—­’

Alfred exploded.

‘I mean,’ pursued his mother, ’that, however busy we are, there must always be intervals to be spared from the world.’

Mutimer again delayed his reply.  A look which he cast at Adela appeared to move her to speech.

‘Have they not their evenings free, as well as every Sunday?’

‘Happily, Miss Waltham, you can’t realise their lives,’ Richard began.  He was not smiling now; Adela’s tone had struck him like a challenge, and he collected himself to meet her.  ’The man who lives on wages is never free; he sells himself body and soul to his employer.  What sort of freedom does a man enjoy who may any day find himself and his family on the point of starvation just because he has lost his work?  All his life long he has before his mind the fear of want—­not only of straitened means, mind you, but of destitution and the workhouse.  How can such a man put aside his common cares?  Religion is a luxury; the working man has no luxuries.  Now, you speak of the free evenings; people always do, when they’re asking why the working classes don’t educate themselves.  Do you understand what that free evening means?  He gets home, say, at six o’clock, tired out; he has to be up again perhaps at five next morning.  What can he do but just lie about half asleep?  Why, that’s the whole principle of the capitalist system of employment; it’s calculated exactly how long a man can be made to work in a day without making him incapable of beginning again on the day following—­just as it’s calculated exactly how little a man can live upon, in the regulation of wages.  If the workman returned home with strength to spare, employers would soon find it out, and workshop legislation would be revised—­because of course it’s the capitalists that make the laws.  The principle is that a man shall have no strength left for himself; it’s all paid for, every scrap of it, bought with the wages at each week end.  What religion can such men have?  Religion, I suppose, means thankfulness for life and its pleasures—­at all events, that’s a great part of it—­and what has a wage-earner to be thankful for?’

‘It sounds very shocking,’ observed Mrs. Waltham, somewhat disturbed by the speaker’s growing earnestness.  Richard paid no attention and continued to address Adela.

’I dare say you’ve heard of the early trains—­workmen’s trains—­that they run on the London railways.  If only you could travel once by one of those!  Between station and station there’s scarcely a man or boy in the carriage who can keep awake; there they sit, leaning over against each other, their heads dropping forward, their eyelids that heavy they can’t hold them up.  I tell you it’s one of the most miserable sights to be seen in this world.  If you saw it, Miss Waltham, you’d pity them, I’m very sure of that!  You only need to know what their life means.  People who have never known hardship often speak more cruelly than they think, and of course it always will be so as long as the rich and the poor are two different races, as much apart as if there was an ocean between them.’