Horace duly had them, the Express duly published them, and they were copied in full by the Dominion and several other leading journals, with an amount of comment which everyone but Mrs Murchison thought remarkable.
"I don't pretend to understand it," she said, "but anybody can see that he knows what he's talking about." John Murchison read them with a critical eye and a pursed-out lip.
"He takes too much for granted." "What does he take for granted ?" asked Mrs Murchison.
"Other folks being like himself," said the father.
That, no doubt, was succinct and true; nevertheless, the articles had competence as well as confidence.

The writer treated facts with restraint and conditions with sympathy.

He summoned ideas from the obscurity of men's minds, and marshalled them in the light, so that many recognized what they had been trying to think.

He wrote with homeliness as well as force, wishing much more to make the issue recognizable than to create fine phrases, with the result that one or two of his sentences passed into the language of the discussion which, as any of its standard-bearers would have told you, had little use for rhetoric.

The articles were competent: if you listened to Horace Williams you would have been obliged to accept them as the last, or latest, word of economic truth, though it must be left to history to endorse Mr Williams.