Once bit, twice shy.  They had braved the wrath of their employers and all the banded influences of the Hall and the Vicarage in order to vote Liberal in December, 1885.  They had got nothing by their constancy; and in six months, when they were again incited to the poll, they shook their heads and abstained.  The disillusionment of the labourers gave the victory of 1886 to the Tories, and kept the Liberals out of power for twenty years.

II

MIST

“Mistiness is the Mother of Wisdom.”  If this sarcastic dogma be true, we are living in a generation pre-eminently wise.  A “season of mists” it unquestionably is; whether it is equally marked by “mellow fruitfulness” is perhaps more disputable.

My path in life is metaphorically very much what Wordsworth’s was literally.  “I wander, lonely as a cloud that floats on high, o’er vales and hills.”  I find hills and vales alike shrouded in mist.  Everyone is befogged, and the guesses as to where exactly we are and whither we are tending are various and perplexing.  While all are, in truth, equally bewildered, people take their bewilderment in different ways.  Some honestly confess that they cannot see a yard in front of them; others profess a more penetrating vision, and affect to be quite sure of what lies ahead.  It is a matter of temperament; but the professors of clear sight are certainly less numerous than they were three years ago.

We are like men standing on a mountain when the mist rolls up from the valley.  At first we all are very cheerful, and assure one another that it will pass away in half an hour, leaving our path quite clear.  Then by degrees we begin to say that it promises to be a more tedious business than we expected, and we must just wait in patience till the clouds roll by.  At length we frankly confess to one another that we have completely lost our bearings, and that we dare not move a foot for fear we should tumble into the abyss.  In this awkward plight our “strength is to sit still”; but, even while we so sit, we try to keep ourselves warm by remembering that the most persistent mists do not last for ever.

In one section of society I hear voices of melancholy vaticination.  “I don’t believe,” said one lady in my hearing—­“I don’t believe that we shall ever again see six-feet footmen with powdered hair,” and a silent gloom settled on the company, only deepened by another lady, also attached to the old order, who murmured:  “Ah! and powdered footmen are not the only things that we shall never see again.”  Within twenty-four hours of this depressing dialogue I encounter my democratic friend, the Editor of the Red Flag.  He glories in the fact that Labour has “come into its own,” and is quite sure that, unless it can get more to eat, it will cease to make munitions, and so will secure an early, if not a satisfactory, peace.  In vain I suggest to my friend that his vision is obscured by the mist, and that the apparition which thus strangely exhilarates him is the creation of his own brain.