Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/196

 coffee. Although they profess to be alarmed at the spiritual terrors of the ballot-box and of an occasional hour in a political committee-room, they are not afraid that their spirituality will suffer if they spend eight hours every day in their store or their counting-house. Their spirituality is of such a curious temper that it receives no harm from pursuits—no matter how secular—by which they can make money for themselves; but they are afraid of the most disastrous consequences if they attempt to render any service to their country. The selfishness of these men is as contemptible as their hypocrisy. They consent to accept all the advantages which come from the political institutions of the nation, and from the zeal and fidelity of their fellow-citizens. &hellip; People who are so very spiritual that they feel compelled to abstain from political life ought also to renounce the benefits which the political exertions of their less spiritual fellow-citizens secure for them. They ought to decline the services of the police when they are assaulted; they ought to refuse to appeal to such an unspiritual authority as a law court when their debts are not paid; and when a legacy is left them they ought piously to abstain from accepting it, for it is only by the intervention of public law that they can inherit what their dead friends have left them. For men to claim the right to neglect their duties to the state on the ground of their piety, while they insist on the state protecting their persons, protecting their property, and protecting from disturbance even their religious meetings in which this exquisitely delicate and valitudinarian spirituality is developed, is gross unrighteousness. It is as morally disgraceful as for a clerk to claim his salary from his employer after leaving other