Thus it will be seen that Wanless, though in his way a profoundly religious man, was in no sense a sectary. He was in fact ranged among the iconoclasts. He sighed for a living faith, not a dead creed; and were he living to-day he would certainly give his hearty support to that band of men who wage war on the shams of modern creeds, who mock unceasingly at the disgusting spectacle of men who call themselves disciples of Christ wrangling over the cut and embroidery of garments, and trying to make themselves martyrs for the sake of a candle or two. The tractarian movement attracted Thomas's attention in a dim way, and he was amused at the frightful din made by the conversions to Romanism which accompanied that curious upheaval of mediævalism. Not that he understood much of the meaning of what was going on. It was not worth discovering, he said; but he was amused over it, and roundly declared that for this and all other ills of the Church there was but one cure—to take away its money. "Let these parsons try living by faith," he would often exclaim. "If they believe in God as they say, why do they not trust him for a living? Their proud stomachs would come down a bit if they are just turned adrift in a body and let shift for themselves. But Lord, what a howl they'll make if the people get up and say we'll have no more of your mummeries, we want our money for a better purpose. They won't think much about God then, I can tell you. It will be every man for himself, and who can grab the most. I never have any patience with parsons, never. They are bad from the beginning, bad all through, self-deluders and misleaders of others at the best, and at the worst—well, not much more except in degree."
"These are the mere ravings of an ignorant peasant," most readers will exclaim. I do not deny that in a certain sense they may seem only that. Yet look around and consider the signs of the times before you dismiss these things as of no significance. What means the spread of secularism amongst the working classes of the present day, the contempt for religion and parsons which most of them display? Is it not a most ominous indication of future trouble for serene lord bishops and their brood when events bring them face to face with the people? I do not admire Charles Bradlaugh's teaching on many points; but I cannot deny the power that he and such as he wield on the common people. It is a power that increases with the spread of education; and what does it betoken? Only this; that in time, for one man among the peasantry who now thinks like Thomas Wanless there will be tens of thousands. The churches and chapels themselves, with their exceedingly worldly respectability, produce these men more certainly than all the teachings of the Bradlaughs; nay, Bradlaugh himself is directly the product of a corrupt, time-serving and utterly blasphemous church organisation. Therefore be not too contemptuous of sentiments like those of this peasant. They are significant of many things—of a coming democracy that will at least try to burn up the rottenness of our modern ultra Pagan-civilization.
On other questions than those of Church and State the opinions of Thomas Wanless were equally uncompromising, and, perhaps, equally impracticable. His intelligence was far deeper than his reading, and much of his political economy, as well as of his code of social morals, was taken from the Bible. To my thinking he could have gone to no better book, but I am also free to admit that his too exclusive study of it gave a quaint and sometimes impracticable turn to his conceptions that may lead many to have a poor opinion of his wisdom.
On the land question, for example, he grew to be a kind of disciple of Moses. He would have had the whole country parcelled out amongst the people—each family enjoying the inalienable right to a certain bit of the soil. The year of jubilee was also, in his eyes, a most merciful and just provision for freeing the unfortunate, or the children of the spendthrift, from the grasp of the usurer—always the most relentless of men—and he often exclaimed—"How much better my lot would have been to-day had a jubilee year brought back to me and mine the land my grandfathers sacrificed in the stress of hard times." And not to land only would he have applied this principle, but to all kinds of indebtedness. "A limit of time should be fixed," he said, "beyond which the debtor should be free from his debt, unless he had committed a crime." The national debt itself he would have treated on this principle; and few things excited his wrath more quickly than any mention of the heavy burden which the consolidated debt continued to be to the English people. In national matters he would have had no debt remaining beyond 30 years, on the principle that it was a crime to cast the burdens of the present on posterity. Freedom to borrow indefinitely was in his eyes, moreover, the cause of much abominable robbery and crime. Next to the Church, however, the object of his deepest hatred and strongest contempt was modern kingship; and here again his inspiration was drawn from the Bible. He told me that he often read Samuel's description of the curse of kingship to his children on Sunday evenings, with a view to make them proper Republicans; and his greatest interest in modern history consisted in tracing the working of this curse in England for the last 200 years. To this evil principle he declared that we owed most of our social miseries, all our wars of aggression, our national debt, our social corruptions, our bad land laws, our standing army, and perhaps even our Established Church, with all its crop of spiritual, moral, and social perversions.
It is easy to understand how a man holding opinions like these should exercise a tremendous influence on the better class of his fellow-workmen. To those who gathered about him in the evenings he was never weary of enlarging on topics like these; and had the nature of the work in hand kept the men permanently together, Thomas must in time have appeared as the leader of a formidable school of democrats. But the navvy is here to-day and gone to-morrow, and the seed which Thomas sowed was scattered far and wide ere two years were over. The good he did is therefore untraceable, yet doubtless his work bore fruit in ways and places unseen, and in after days may have increased the receptivity of the labouring poor after a fashion that the modern agitator thought due wholly to his own exertions.
Over the wild Irishmen who formed the majority of the gangs on the line Thomas never obtained any influence; and, in his opinion, they were either a race of men bad from its very beginning, or whose nature had been warped and debased by a long course of shameful tyranny and deep-rooted habits of submission to degrading superstitions. However produced, the Irish, in his esteem, were wretched creatures. They lacked honesty and independence, and would beg like pariahs one hour from a man whom they would treacherously murder the next in their drunken furies. More than once he had the greatest difficulty in keeping clear of the devastating fights with which these wild men of the west were in the habit of finishing up their drunken revels, and once he, and the more respectable men who followed him, had to arm themselves and help to protect some villages in the neighbourhood of the line from being stormed and sacked by a squad of Irishmen out for a spree. Life surrounded by such elements was dreary at the best, and, good though the wages might be, Thomas was not sorry when the job was finished, and the way open for him to return once more to his own little cottage in Ashbrook.