under deprivation of luxuries, with its God Comfort beggared?  Ay, my Beauchamp,”—­the most offensive thing to me is that “my Beauchamp,” but old Nevil has evidently given himself up hand and foot to this ruffian—­“ay, when you reflect that fear of the so-called rabble, i.e. the people, the unmoneyed class, which knows not Comfort, tastes not of luxuries, is the main component of their noisy frigid loyalty, and that the people are not with them but against, and yet that the people might be won by visible forthright kingly service to a loyalty outdoing theirs as the sun the moon; ay, that the people verily thirst to love and reverence; and that their love is the only love worth having, because it is disinterested love, and endures, and takes heat in adversity,—­reflect on it and wonder at the inversion of things!  So with a Church.  It lives if it is at home with the poor.  In the arms of enriched shopkeepers it rots, goes to decay in vestments—­vestments! flakes of mummy-wraps for it! or else they use it for one of their political truncheons—­to awe the ignorant masses:  I quote them.  So.  Not much ahead of ancient Egyptians in spirituality or in priestcraft!  They call it statesmanship.  O for a word for it!  Let Palsy and Cunning go to form a word.  Deadmanship, I call it.”—­To quote my uncle the baron, this is lunatic dribble!—­“Parsons and princes are happy with the homage of this huge passive fleshpot class.  It is enough for them.  Why not?  The taxes are paid and the tithes.  Whilst commercial prosperity lasts!"’

Colonel Halkett threw his arms aloft.

’"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: