‘Then I don’t know it, and what is more, I don’t mean to do it. That is the common cant; no thinker outside the details of his trade can steer clear of the bankruptcy court. And we have the disastrous fate of Burns and of other thinkers—poets, politicians and what not, in their respective businesses—lugged in as a timely warning. I tell you no man’s thought and culture, unless they were attended by some radical mental defect or fatal self-indulgence, ever disqualified him from managing his worldly affairs. The reverse has been proved over and over again; but it does not suit the commonplace world, and you as its present exponent, to believe it. However, I am no poet or astronomer or geologist. Unlike the Laird of Cockpen, my head is not taken up with the affairs of the State. Even my scholarship is of modest dimensions. Moreover, I shall make it my careful endeavour not to ruin myself, were it only to give the lie to my self-complacent friends who go in for business on what they call business principles, forsooth!—every man for himself and the most money soonest made—as if there were not sounder as well as higher laws of political economy than some of the political economists themselves ever touched. But if I do ruin myself in an attempt to regenerate society, as you, Fan, term—rather grandiloquently—my simple resolution to stick to the old shop and do the best I can with it, can I ruin myself in a worthier cause?’ Then, in contradiction to his disclaimer of anything remarkable in his purpose, he began to repeat with repressed enthusiasm:— ‘Can a man die better Than facing fearful odds?’ She would not let him finish the verse. She broke in with the old fruitless adjuration, ‘Oh, Oliver, think again.’ CHAPTER V. A LAST APPEAL. ‘THINK twice over what you are going to do,’ urged Fan, for the last time. ‘I tell you that you look back on the past softened by distance, and I suppose surrounded by a sort of halo of youthful associations and kindly recollections. I have never been removed from Friarton Mill for such a length of time as to forget all its ills and only remember its advantages. How will you like to hang on in the mill and, worse, in the bakehouse and shop—to be bearded by your own men, who will be the first to recognise that you have not been bred to their trade and to make good use of your ignorance—to be worsted by trades’ unions—for I conclude bakers will go out “on strike,” if they have not yet done so—like other work people? How will you stand being patronised by the farmers and corn-dealers, and having to submit to the whims and insolence of your customers?’