I would shut up half the public-houses in spite of all the brewers in the Lords and Commons; and for Church matters, parishioners should have some control over their pastors.

If ever our Establishment is overthrown, that catastrophe will be due to clerical faults and defaults, rather than to lay apathy or hostility.

If rectors were less tyrannical, congregations would love them better; and if curates were more inclined to Luther than to Rome, the Protestant heart of England would the gladlier appreciate their zeal and capabilities.

As to the social mischief of Trades' Unions, an organised conspiracy of employed against employers, fatal to both, I have often exposed that evil in newspapers, though anonymously.

It is an outrage on the honest working man with a family, that even in starving times he is obliged by paid demagogues to refuse work and wages unless he will give the least labour for the most pay, as the worst of his mates are glad to be forced to do: while the wicked absurdity of strikes, smashing factory windows and destroying machinery in order to coerce unfortunate masters to pay higher wages than they can afford, is climaxed by those brigand processions of idle roughs who go about bawling, "We've no work to do, and wouldn't do it if we had." The British workman (of course with many exceptions) has become a byword for everything unpleasant, which both large contractors and small employers avoid if they can: drink, bank holidays, radical spouters, the conceit of being better than their betters, and above all that suicidal iniquity of strikes, seem in these latter days to have generally demoralised a race of citizens of whose virtues our commonwealth once was proud.