“—­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.’

‘Is there more of it?’ said Colonel Halkett, flapping his forehead for coolness.

’The impudence of this dog in presuming to talk about India!—­eh, colonel?  Only a paragraph or two more:  I skip a lot . . . .  Ah! here we are.’  Captain Baskelett read to himself and laughed in derision:  ’He calls our Constitution a compact unsigned by the larger number involved in it.  What’s this?  “A band of dealers in fleshpottery.”  Do you detect a gleam of sense?  He underscores it.  Then he comes to this’:  Captain Baskelett requested Colonel Halkett to read for himself:  ’The stench of the trail of Ego in our History.’

The colonel perused it with an unsavoury expression of his features, and jumped up.

‘Oddly, Mr. Romfrey thought this rather clever,’ said Captain Baskelett, and read rapidly: 

’"Trace the course of Ego for them:  first the king who conquers and can govern.  In his egoism he dubs him holy; his family is of a selected blood; he makes the crown hereditary—­Ego.  Son by son the shame of egoism increases; valour abates; hereditary Crown, no hereditary qualities.  The Barons rise.  They in turn hold sway, and for their order—­Ego.  The traders overturn them:  each class rides the classes under it while it can.  It is ego—­ego, the fountain cry, origin, sole source of war!  Then death to ego, I say!  If those traders had ruled for other than ego, power might have rested with them on broad basis enough to carry us forward for centuries.  The workmen have ever been too anxious to be ruled.  Now comes on the workman’s era.  Numbers win in the end: