the
majority of his equals, than he wants a similar machinery to make him understand
that his head and a stone wall cannot occupy the same space at the same moment.
Do you want further explanation?«
    »Well, yes, I do,« quoth I.
    Old Hammond settled himself in his chair with a look of enjoyment which
rather alarmed me, and made me dread a scientific disquisition: so I sighed and
abided. He said:
    »I suppose you know pretty well what the process of government was in the
bad old times?«
    »I am supposed to know,« said I.
    (Hammond). What was the government of those days? Was it really the
Parliament or any part of it?
    (I). No.
    (H.). Was not the Parliament on the one side a kind of watch-committee
sitting to see that the interests of the Upper Classes took no hurt; and on the
other side a sort of blind to delude the people into supposing that they had
some share in the management of their own affairs?
    (I). History seems to show us this.
    (H.). To what extent did the people manage their own affairs?
    (I). I judge from what I have heard that sometimes they forced the
Parliament to make a law to legalise some alteration which had already taken
place.
    (H.). Anything else?
    (I). I think not. As I am informed, if the people made any attempt to deal
with the cause of their grievances, the law stepped in and said, this is
sedition, revolt, or what not, and slew or tortured the ringleaders of such
attempts.
    (H.). If Parliament was not the government then, nor the people either, what
was the government?
    (I). Can you tell me?
    (H.). I think we shall not be far wrong if we say that government was the
Law-Courts, backed up by the executive, which handled the brute force that the
deluded people allowed them to use for their own purposes; I mean the army,
navy, and police.
    (I). Reasonable men must needs think you are right.
    (H.). Now as to those Law-Courts. Were they places of fair dealing according
to the ideas of the day? Had a poor man a good chance of defending his property
and person in them?
    (I). It is a commonplace that even rich men looked upon a law-suit as a dire
misfortune, even if they