oth these, and therefore you must really excuse us if we----
Quite so! But, of course, as co-workers in the good cause, we wish you
well----", and so forth.

The opposition of the general public I have explained. It was not really
opposition. It was simply a part of the disease of the period; the
dropsical, fatty degeneration of a people. But the mere fact that the
reformers sent forth their cries and still laboured beside the public's
crowded race-course; that such people as the lady I have mentioned
existed--and there were many like her--should show that London as I
found it was not all shadow and gloom, as it seems when one looks back
upon it from the clear light of better days.

The darkness, the confusion, and the din, were not easy to see and hear
through then. From this distance they are more impenetrable; but I know
the light did break through continually in places, and good men and
women held wide the windows of their consciousness to welcome it,
striving their utmost to carry it into the thick of the fight. Many
broke their hearts in the effort; but there were others, and those who
fell had successors. The heart of our race never was of the stuff that
can be broken. It was the strongest thing in all that tumultuous world
of my youth, and I recall now the outstanding figures of men already
gray and bowed by long lives of strenuous endeavour, who yet fought
without pause at this time on the side of those who strove to check the
mad, blind flight of the people.

London, as I entered it, was a battle-field; the perverse waste of human
energy and life was frightful; but it was not quite the unredeemed chaos
which it seems as we look back upon it.

Even in the red centre of the stampede (Fleet Street is within the City
boundaries) men in the race took time for the exercise of human
kindliness, when opportunity was brought close enough to them. The
letter I took to the editor of the _Daily Gazette_ was from an old
friend of his who knew, and told him, of my exact circumstances. This
gentleman received me kindly and courteously. He and his like were
among the most furiously hurried in the race, but their handling of
great masses of diffuse information gave them, in many cases, a wide
outlook, and where, as often happened, they were well balanced as well
as honest, I think they served their age as truly as any of their
contemporaries, and with more effect than most.

This gentleman talked to me for ten minutes, du