"'What do they do? Brain work? No, they live by the brain work of others. How do they spend their days then?
"'In enjoyment, mental and bodily enjoyment of that which others have done and are doing. In luxury, in idleness, in social formalities, in king-worship, in travelling, in repose do they live.' At this point he kept on substituting one word for another, but made no pause.
"Their greatest exertion, he said, was to try to enjoy an additional party or an extra levee, their greatest danger was a cold or an overtaxed digestion.
"And in order that the fruit of other people's labour should not be taken from them, what did they do?
"They opposed everything which threatened them with a new order of things. They opposed all needful changes. They opposed emancipation for those who had nothing in the world. They behaved as though society had from eternity been ordained for them, as though they could say 'Thus far and no farther.'
"You will understand that I have learnt all these ideas from my intercourse with him. I could after my own fashion make all his speeches, and that more fluently; but I believe that this exchanging one word for another, and his perpetually halting over it, made the words that he finally did choose more significant. For my part, I have written down everything that happened in our short life together."
"Everything?"
"I mean everything that mattered at all. Everything, everything. He never wrote a line, he said he had no time, he despised it. And when death took him from me and from us all, what had I better to do? No—don't interrupt me—let me go on telling you! He repeated the same thought from the religious point of view. It was his way to look at the same idea from every side. He said that to-day he had been to see an old woman who said that she couldn't go to church because she had no shoes. There was no end of trouble to get her some, for the two shoe-shops wouldn't sell any on Sunday, but she got them. He saw her afterwards go to church, just at the same time as the Queen and her suite.
"And he thought, there are so many who sit in church with wretched shoes on, and so many at home, who dare not venture to church because of their miserable shoes, or the rest of their miserable garments. Who are they who have such wretched shoes and clothing? They who have worked most, worked until they are broken with toil.
"But those who have not worked have ten pairs of shoes, they could have a thousand; and clothes too, in the greatest superfluity. He had not been to church, he said, but he knew that there they held forth as though it were the most natural thing in the world that those who had shoes should give them to those who had none. You would gather from the preaching that Jesus Himself had taught it, Jesus had come to make all men happy, and this was the best way! For it is written, 'He went about doing good.'