QUEEN (_good-humouredly_). You and I have had differences of opinion
sometimes, Brown.

J.B. True, Ma'am; that _has_ happened; I've known it happen. And I've
never regretted it, never! But the difference there is, Ma'am, that I'm
not your Prime Minister. Had I been--you'd 'a been more stiff about giving
in--naturally! Now there's Mr. Gladstone, Ma'am; I'm not denying he's a
great man; but he's got too many ideas for my liking, far too many! I'm
not against temperance any more than he is--put in its right place. But
he's got that crazy notion of "local option" in his mind; he's coming to
it, gradually. And he doesn't think how giving "local option," to them
that don't take the wide view of things, may do harm to a locality. You
must be wide in your views, else you do somebody an injustice.

QUEEN. Yes, Brown; and that is why I like being up in the hills, where the
views _are_ wide.

J.B. I put it this way, Ma'am. You come to a locality, and you find you
can't get served as you are accustomed to be served. Well! you don't go
there again, and you tell others not to go; and so the place gets a bad
name. I've a brother who keeps an inn down at Aberlochy on the coach
route, and he tells me that more than half his customers come from outside
the locality.

QUEEN. Of course; naturally!

J.B. Well now, Ma'am, it'll be for the bad locality to have half the
custom that comes to it turned away, because of local option! And believe
me, Ma'am, that's what it will come to. People living in it won't see till
the shoe pinches them; and by that time my brother, and others like him,