One of the New Voters 



recommend the weary reaper to read. For a man is 

 not a horse: the horse's day's work is over; taken to 

 his stable he is content, his mind goes no deeper than 

 the bottom of his manger, and so long as his nose does 

 not feel the wood, so long as it is met by corn and hay, 

 he will endure happily. But Roger the reaper is not a 

 horse. 



Just as his body needed food and drink, so did his 

 mind require recreation, and that chiefly consists of 

 conversation. The drinking and the smoking are in 

 truth but the attributes of the labourer's public-house 

 evening. It is conversation that draws him thither, 

 just as it draws men with money in their pockets to 

 the club and the houses of their friends. Any one can 

 drink or smoke alone; it needs several for conversa- 

 tion, for company. You pass a public-house the 

 reaper's house in the summer evening. You see a 

 number of men grouped about trestle-tables out of 

 doors, and others sitting at the open window ; there is 

 an odour of tobacco, a chink of glasses and mugs. 

 You can smell the tobacco and see the ale ; you cannot 

 see the indefinite power which holds men there the 

 magnetism of company and conversation. Their 

 conversation, not your conversation; not the last 

 book, the last play; not saloon conversation; but 

 theirs talk in which neither you nor any one of your 

 condition could really join. To us there would seem 

 nothing at all in that conversation, vapid and sub- 

 jectless; to them it means much. We have not been 

 through the same circumstances: our day has been 

 differently spent, and the same words have therefore a 

 varying value. Certain it is, that it is conversation 

 that takes men to the public-house. Had Roger been 

 a horse he would have hastened to borrow some food, 

 and, having eaten that, would have cast himself at 

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