isplays of feeling on the top of the coach. At such times the
passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope,
exhorting them to patience, and holding out hopes of possible
compensation in another world for the hardness of their lot, while
others contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled and
injured. It was agreed that it was a great pity that the coach should
be so hard to pull, and there was a sense of general relief when the
specially bad piece of road was gotten over. This relief was not,
indeed, wholly on account of the team, for there was always some
danger at these bad places of a general overturn in which all would
lose their seats.

It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of the spectacle of
the misery of the toilers at the rope was to enhance the passengers'
sense of the value of their seats upon the coach, and to cause them to
hold on to them more desperately than before. If the passengers could
only have felt assured that neither they nor their friends would ever
fall from the top, it is probable that, beyond contributing to the
funds for liniments and bandages, they would have troubled themselves
extremely little about those who dragged the coach.

I am well aware that this will appear to the men and women of the
twentieth century an incredible inhumanity, but there are two facts,
both very curious, which partly explain it. In the first place, it was
firmly and sincerely believed that there was no other way in which
Society could get along, except the many pulled at the rope and the
few rode, and not only this, but that no very radical improvement even
was possible, either in the harness, the coach, the roadway, or the
distribution of the toil. It had always been as it was, and it always
would be so. It was a pity, but it could not be helped, and philosophy
forbade wasting compassion on what was beyond remedy.

The other fact is yet more curious, consisting in a singular
hallucination which those on the top of the coach generally shared,
that they were not exactly like their brothers and sisters who pulled
at the rope, but of finer clay, in some way belonging to a higher
order of beings who might justly expect to be drawn. This seems
unaccountable, but, as I once rode on this very coach and shared that
very hallucination, I ought to be believed. The strangest thing about
the hallucination was that those who had but just climbed up from the
ground, before they