The very last thing that any well-conducted journal would have dreamed of would be the printing of a slashing and remorseless attack upon the great Middle Class--the backbone of the country and the mainstay of modern journalism. Censures of the “smart set,” foolishly so called, and of their social descendants, of course had been administered _ad nauseam_, thereby giving to a limited body of showy persons (with more money--or credit--than brains) an exaggerated sense of their own interest and importance. The lower orders, too, had met with stern rebuke (for their thriftlessness, their laziness, and their self-indulgence) but only in journals which the lower orders never read. The _Epoch_, however, assailed with tooth and nail the denizens of the great middle country, the buffer state in which dwelt all the respectables--the clergy, the doctors, the lawyers, brokers, dentists, accountants, surveyors, merchants, shopkeepers, active and retired, who “made England what it was,” and what the _Epoch_ roundly declared it ought not to be. As a journalistic programme this was considered part and parcel of the midsummer madness that had fallen on the distracted capital. Fleet Street, Printing House Square, Bouverie Street, Shoe Lane, and Whitefriars, as embodied in the persons of representative journalists, shook their heads. “It was playing the fool”; it was “not cricket”; it was “quarrelling with your bread-and-butter,” or killing the goose that laid the golden--or at least the gilded--eggs; it was “the reckless destruction of a splendid commercial property”--in short, such bad “biz,” that no editor would pursue it unless under orders to ride deliberately for a fall. In particular, to assail the Church! the Law!! the Medical Faculty!!! in one fell charge! Midsummer madness, indeed! To fall foul, not merely of one learned profession--especially when the _Epoch_ might have gone for one of them (the clergy for choice), and with impunity; but to attack all three was--well it was pure, absolute, and undiluted lunacy. Thus quoth Fleet Street. But the onslaught continued. From the archbishops down to the deacons, none was spared.