bulk of that reading public
which sustained Mr. Brumley and his kind--they wanted something else!

And behind and beneath these immediately disconcerting things still more
sinister hintings and questioning were beginning to pluck at
contentment. In 1899 nobody would have dreamt of asking and in 1909 even
Mr. Brumley was asking, "Are things going on much longer?" A hundred
little incidents conspired to suggest that a Christianity that had, to
put it mildly, shirked the Darwinian challenge, had no longer the
palliating influence demanded of a national religion, and that down
there in the deep levels of labour where they built railways to carry
Mr. Brumley's food and earn him dividends, where they made engines and
instruments and textiles and drains for his little needs, there was a
new, less bounded discontent, a grimmer spirit, something that one tried
in vain to believe was only the work of "agitators," something that was
to be pacified no longer by the thin pretences of liberalism, something
that might lead ultimately--optimism scarcely dared to ask whither....

Mr. Brumley did his best to resist the influence of these darkening
ideas. He tried to keep it up that everything was going well and that
most of these shadows and complaints were the mischief of a few
incurably restless personalities. He tried to keep it up that to belong
to the working class was a thoroughly jolly thing--for those who were
used to it. He declared that all who wanted to alter our laws or our
ideas about property or our methods of production were envious and base
and all who wanted any change between the sexes, foolish or vicious. He
tried to go on disposing of socialists, agitators, feminists, women's
suffragists, educationists and every sort of reformer with a
good-humoured contempt. And he found an increasing difficulty in keeping
his contempt sufficiently good-humoured. Instead of laughing down at
folly and failure, he had moments when he felt that he was rather
laughing up--a little wryly--at monstrous things impending. And since
ideas are things of atmosphere and the spirit, insidious wolves of the
soul, they crept up to him and gnawed the insides out of him even as he
posed as their manful antagonist.

Insensibly Mr. Brumley moved with his times. It is the necessary first
phase in the break-up of any system of unsound assumptions that a number
of its votaries should presently set about padding its cutting corners
and relieving the hars