‘No!’ roared Palmet; ’you didn’t.  There’s the cruelty of the whole affair.’

Beauchamp laughed.  ’An old messmate of mine, Lieutenant Jack Wilmore, can give you a different version of the story.  I never have fought a duel, and never will.  Here we are at the shop of a tough voter, Mr. Oggler.  So it says in my note-book.  Shall we put Lord Palmet to speak to him first?’

‘If his lordship will put his heart into what he says,’ Mr. Oggler bowed.  ‘Are you for giving the people recreation on a Sunday, my lord?’

’Trap-bat and ball, cricket, dancing, military bands, puppet-shows, theatres, merry-go-rounds, bosky dells—­anything to make them happy,’ said Palmet.

’Oh, dear! then I ’m afraid we cannot ask you to speak to this Mr. Carpendike.’  Oggler shook his head.

‘Does the fellow want the people to be miserable?’

‘I’m afraid, my lord, he would rather see them miserable.’

They introduced themselves to Mr. Carpendike in his shop.  He was a flat-chested, sallow young shoemaker, with a shelving forehead, who seeing three gentlemen enter to him recognized at once with a practised resignation that they had not come to order shoe-leather, though he would fain have shod them, being needy; but it was not the design of Providence that they should so come as he in his blindness would have had them.  Admitting this he wished for nothing.

The battle with Carpendike lasted three-quarters of an hour, during which he was chiefly and most effectively silent.  Carpendike would not vote for a man that proposed to open museums on the Sabbath day.  The striking simile of the thin end of the wedge was recurred to by him for a damning illustration.  Captain Beauchamp might be honest in putting his mind on most questions in his address, when there was no demand upon him to do it; but honesty was no antidote to impiety.  Thus Carpendike.

As to Sunday museuming being an antidote to the pothouse—­no.  For the people knew the frequenting of the pothouse to be a vice; it was a temptation of Satan that often in overcoming them was the cause of their flying back to grace:  whereas museums and picture galleries were insidious attractions cloaked by the name of virtue, whereby they were allured to abandon worship.

Beauchamp flew at this young monster of unreason:  ’But the people are not worshipping; they are idling and sotting, and if you carry your despotism farther still, and shut them out of every shop on Sundays, do you suppose you promote the spirit of worship?  If you don’t revolt them you unman them, and I warn you we can’t afford to destroy what manhood remains to us in England.  Look at the facts.’

He flung the facts at Carpendike with the natural exaggeration of them which eloquence produces, rather, as a rule, to assure itself in passing of the overwhelming justice of the cause it pleads than to deceive the adversary.  Brewers’ beer and publicans’ beer, wife-beatings, the homes and the blood of the people, were matters reviewed to the confusion of Sabbatarians.