pat with my hand, and saying to it, "You might have been hair-springs
for watches." I know an odd-looking little man attached to a certain
railway-station, whose business it is, when a train comes in, to go
round it with a large box of a yellow concoction and supply grease to
the wheels. I have often looked out of the carriage-window at that
odd little man and thought to myself, "Now you might have been a
chief-justice." And, indeed, I can say from personal observation that
the stuff ultimately converted into cabinet-ministers does not at an
early stage at all appreciably differ from that which never becomes more
than country-parsons. There is a great gulf between the human being who
gratefully receives a shilling, and touches his cap as he receives it,
and the human being whose income is paid in yearly or half-yearly sums,
and to whom a pecuniary tip would appear as an insult; yet, of course,
that great gulf is the result of training alone. John Smith the laborer,
with twelve shillings a week, and the bishop with eight thousand a
year, had, by original constitution, precisely the same kind of feeling
towards that much-sought, yet much-abused reality which provides the
means of life. Who shall reckon up by what millions of slight touches
from the hand of circumstance, extending over many years, the one man is
gradually formed into the giving of the shilling, and the other man into
the receiving of it with that touch of his hat? Who shall read back the
forming influences at work since the days in the cradle, that gradually
formed one man into sitting down to dinner, and another man into waiting
behind his chair? I think it would be occasionally a comfort, if one
could believe, as American planters profess to believe about their
slaves, that there is an original and essential difference between men;
for, truly, the difference in their positions is often so tremendous
that it is painful to think that it is the self-same clay and the
self-same common mind that are promoted to dignity and degraded to
servitude. And if _you_ sometimes feel _that_,--_you_, in whose favor