enrich themselves, not others, and that corporate association which was
the blood of the Middle Ages, and the power of popular opinion, and, in
general, freedom. But out of all these things that have perished, the
tide remains, and in the eighteen clauses of the Customs, the tidal
clause alone stands fresh and still has meaning. The capital, great
clinching clause by which men owned their own land within the town has
gone utterly and altogether. The modern workman on the Tyne would not
understand you perhaps, to whom in that very place you should say, "Many
centuries ago the men that came before you here, your fathers, were not
working precariously at a wage, or paying rent to others, but living
under their own roofs and working for themselves." There is only one
passage in the document that all could understand in Newcastle
to-day--the very few rich who are hardly secure, the myriads of poor who
are not secure at all--and that passage is the passage which talks of
the third tide; for even to-day there is some good we have left
undestroyed and the sea still ebbs and flows.

This little note of the Newcastle men, and of the flowing and the ebbing
of their sea, is to be found, you say, in the archives of England? Not
at all! It is to be found in the Acts of the Parliament of Scotland--at
least, so my book assures me, but why I do not know. Perhaps of the
times when between Tyne and Tees, men looked northward and of the times
when they looked southward (for they alternately did one and the other
during many hundreds of years) those times when they looked northward
seemed the more natural to them. Anyhow, the reference is to the Acts of
the Parliament of Scotland, and that is the end of it.