Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/234

 hearts and harder brains. With all that philosophers write, and all that philanthropists do (and I really believe in the existence of true philanthropists even in spite of the existence of false philanthropists), the old saying "homo homini lupus," "man is a wolf to man," still holds true: and the old verse of the old song has not lost its melancholy meaning—

Returning from one of my "inquiries" in the neighbourhood of a small town in a south-western county, I walked part of the way back with an old man in a strange long blue cloth dress coat, with enormous brass buttons, which had once been yellow, and top boots, the tops of which had once been yellow too. It was his Sunday dress, perhaps half a century, at least a quarter of a century, old. A tailor in a town in those parts told me that he had just seen a man come into that town with a coat on his back which he (the tailor) had made for him twenty-four years before. I could not at first guess what the strangely accoutred old man could be. He turned out to be a shoemaker. He