’"Meanwhile, note this:  the people are the Power to come.  Oppressed, unprotected, abandoned; left to the ebb and flow of the tides of the market, now taken on to work, now cast off to starve, committed to the shifting laws of demand and supply, slaves of Capital-the whited name for old accursed.  Mammon:  and of all the. ranked and black-uniformed host no pastor to come out of the association of shepherds, and proclaim before heaven and man the primary claim of their cause; they are, I say, the power, worth the seduction of by another Power not mighty in England now:  and likely in time to set up yet another Power not existing in England now.  What if a passive comfortable clergy hand them over to men on the models of Irish pastors, who will succour, console, enfold, champion them? what if, when they have learnt to use their majority, sick of deceptions and the endless pulling of interests, they raise one representative to force the current of action with an authority as little fictitious as their preponderance of numbers?  The despot and the priest!  There I see our danger, Beauchamp.  You and I and some dozen labour to tie and knot them to manliness.  We are few; they are many and weak.  Rome offers them real comfort in return for their mites in coin, and—­poor souls! mites in conscience, many of them.  A Tyrant offers them to be directly their friend.  Ask, Beauchamp, why they should not have comfort for pay as well as the big round—­“’

Captain Baskelett stopped and laid the letter out for Colonel Halkett to read an unmentionable word, shamelessly marked by Nevil’s pencil: 

     “—­belly-class!” Ask, too, whether the comfort they wish for is not
     approaching divine compared with the stagnant fleshliness of that
     fat shopkeeper’s Comfort.

’"Warn the people of this.  Ay, warn the clergy.  It is not only the poor that are caught by ranters.  Endeavour to make those accommodating shepherds understand that they stand a chance of losing rich as well as poor!  It should awaken them.  The helpless poor and the uneasy rich are alike open to the seductions of Romish priests and intoxicated ranters.  I say so it will be if that band of forty thousand go on slumbering and nodding.  They walk in a dream.  The flesh is a dream.  The soul only is life.”

’Now for you, colonel.

’"No extension of the army—­no!  A thousand times no.  Let India go, then!  Good for India that we hold India?  Ay, good:  but not at such a cost as an extra tax, or compulsory service of our working man.  If India is to be held for the good of India, throw open India to the civilized nations, that they help us in a task that overstrains us.  At present India means utter perversion of the policy of England.  Adrift India! rather than England red-coated.  We dissent, Beauchamp!  For by-and-by.”

‘That is,’ Captain Baskelett explained, ’by-and-by Shrapnel will have old Nevil fast enough.’