But what really hindered my brother from taking an active share in our work was not these eccentricities, which soon wore off, and were, at the worst, superficial. When he came to look the work fairly in the face, he found that he could not heartily sympathise with it; and the quality of thoroughness in him, which your grandfather notices, would not let him join half-heartedly. His conclusion was reached somehow in this way: “It comes to this, then. What you are all aiming at is, the complete overthrow of the present trade system, and the substitution of what, you say, will prove a more honest and righteous one. It is not simply a question of setting up, and getting a legal status for, these half-dozen associations of tailors and shoemakers, and these grocery stores. If the principle is good for anything, it must spread everywhere, and into every industrial process. It can’t live peaceably side by side with the present system. They are absolutely antagonistic, and the one must cast out the other. Isn’t that so?” I, of course, could not deny the conclusion. “Well, then,” his argument went on, “I don’t see my way clearly enough to go on. Your principle I can’t object to. It certainly seems truer, and stronger, and more in accord with Christianity, than the other. But, after all, the business of the world has always gone on upon the other, and the world has had plenty of time to get to understand its own business. You may say the results are not satisfactory, are proofs that the world has done nothing but blunder. It may be so: but, after all, experience must count for something, and the practical wear and tear of centuries. Self-interest may be a low motive, but the system founded upon it has managed somehow, with all its faults, to produce a very tolerable kind of world. When yours comes to be tried practically, just as great abuses may be found inseparable from it. You may only get back the old evils under new forms. The long and short of it is, I hate upsetting things, which seems to be your main object. You say that you like to see people discontented with society as it is, and are ready to help to make them so, because it is full of injustice, and abuses of all kinds, and will never be better till men are thoroughly discontented. I don’t see these evils so strongly as you do; don’t believe in heroic remedies; and would sooner see people contented, and making the best of society as they find it. In fact, I was born and bred a Tory, and can’t help it.”