It is impossible to conceive a case of greater injustice.

It is no answer to say that some six or nine or twelve old men receive as much of the goods of this world as such old men require.

On what foundation, moral or divine, traditional or legal, is grounded the warden's claim to the large income he receives for doing nothing?
The contentment of these almsmen, if content they be, can give him no title to this wealth! Does he ever ask himself, when he stretches wide his clerical palm to receive the pay of some dozen of the working clergy, for what service he is so remunerated?
Does his conscience ever entertain the question of his right to such subsidies?
Or is it possible that the subject never so presents itself to his mind; that he has received for many years, and intends, should God spare him, to receive for years to come these fruits of the industrious piety of past ages, indifferent as to any right on his own part, or of any injustice to others! We must express an opinion that nowhere but in the Church of England, and only there among its priests, could such a state of moral indifference be found." I must for the present leave my readers to imagine the state of Mr Harding's mind after reading the above article.

They say that forty thousand copies of _The Jupiter_ are daily sold, and that each copy is read by five persons at the least.

Two hundred thousand readers then would hear this accusation against him; two hundred thousand hearts would swell with indignation at the griping injustice, the barefaced robbery of the warden of Barchester Hospital! And how was he to answer this?
How was he to open his inmost heart to this multitude, to these thousands, the educated, the polished, the picked men of his own country; how show them that he was no robber, no avaricious, lazy priest scrambling for gold, but a retiring, humble-spirited man, who had innocently taken what had innocently been offered to him?
"Write to _The Jupiter_," suggested the bishop.
"Yes," said the archdeacon, more worldly wise than his father, "yes, and be smothered with ridicule; tossed over and over again with scorn; shaken this way and that, as a rat in the mouth of a practised terrier.