ONE OF THE NEW VOTERS. 107 



still it is the same ; with our engines, our electric 

 light, our printing press, still the coarse lahour of the 

 mine, the quarry, the field has to be carried out by 

 human hands. While that is so, it is useless to 

 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 Koger 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 conversation, 

 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 indefi- 

 nite 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 subjectless ; to them it means 



