opinion.

' Why, the man's an infidel!' Colonel Halkett exclaimed.

'There are numbers.'

'They have the grace not to confess, then.'

'It's as well to know what the world's made of, colonel. The clergy shut
their eyes. There's no treating a disease without reading it; and if we
are to acknowledge a "vice," as Dr. Shrapnel would say of the so-called
middle-class, it is the smirking over what they think, or their not
caring to think at all. Too many time-servers rot the State. I can
understand the effect of such writing on a mind like Captain Beauchamp's.
It would do no harm to our young men to have those letters read publicly
and lectured on-by competent persons. Half the thinking world may think
pretty much the same on some points as Dr. Shrapnel; they are too wise or
too indolent to say it: and of the other half, about a dozen members
would be competent to reply to him. He is the earnest man, and flies at
politics as uneasy young brains fly to literature, fancying they can
write because they can write with a pen. He perceives a bad adjustment
of things: which is correct. He is honest, and takes his honesty for a
virtue: and that entitles him to believe in himself: and that belief
causes him to see in all opposition to him the wrong he has perceived in
existing circumstances: and so in a dream of power he invokes the people:
and as they do not stir, he takes to prophecy. This is the round of the
politics of impatience. The study of politics should be guided by some
light of statesmanship, otherwise it comes to this wild preaching.

These men are theory-tailors, not politicians. They are the men who make