displays of feeling on the top of the coach. At such times the
passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the
rope, exhorting them to patience, and holding out hopes of
possible compensation in another world for the hardness of their
lot, while others contributed to buy salves and liniments for the
crippled and injured. It was agreed that it was a great pity that
the coach should be so hard to pull, and there was a sense of
general relief when the specially bad piece of road was gotten
over. This relief was not, indeed, wholly on account of the team,
for there was always some danger at these bad places of a general
overturn in which all would lose their seats.

It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of the
spectacle of the misery of the toilers at the rope was to enhance
the passengers' sense of the value of their seats upon the coach,
and to cause them to hold on to them more desperately than
before. If the passengers could only have felt assured that neither
they nor their friends would ever fall from the top, it is probable
that, beyond contributing to the funds for liniments and bandages,
they would have troubled themselves extremely little about
those who dragged the coach.

I am well aware that this will appear to the men and women
of the twentieth century an incredible inhumanity, but there are
two facts, both very curious, which partly explain it. In the first
place, it was firmly and sincerely believed that there was no other
way in which Society could get along, except the many pulled at
the rope and the few rode, and not only this, but that no very
radical improvement even was possible, either in the harness, the
coach, the roadway, or the distribution of the toil. It had always