This untoward event was in many ways a knock-down blow to the old labourer and his wife. She, however, sorrowed mostly on personal grounds, and dwelt on gloomy prospects of wounds and violent deaths as the only lot now open for her son--bone of her bone, and flesh of her flesh--whom she had nursed and tended from the womb only for this. Like a good housewife, she mourned also the loss of Jacob's wages, which not only helped to keep the wolf from the door, but also served to nourish the hope that one day all might yet see the new land of promise. If any savings could be pointed to they were always in the mother's eyes due to those wonderful earnings of her boy's. Thomas shared these feelings with his wife, but he had others into which she did not enter. The emigration scheme had, perforce, to be given up, and that was to him a far more bitter thought than to his wife, who declared that she did not mind if they all went, but hung back at the thought of "putting one after another of her children into a living tomb," as she phrased it. But the deepest pain of all to Thomas probably lay in the humiliation he felt in having a son a soldier. The trade of murder, as he called it, was to his mind the most degrading to which a man's hands could be set. He firmly believed that standing armies were a mockery of the Almighty, and that the nations which fostered them would sooner or later sink to perdition beneath the blows of divine vengeance. Armies led to wars, and wars were the curse of the world, he averred, and when contradicted was ready to prove to his antagonist that all the wars in which England had been engaged since the revolution of 1688, were dictated by the worst passions of mankind. Either, he said, they were undertaken to consolidate the power of a rapacious faction over the lives, liberties, and means of the people at large, or they were actuated by mere bestial greed, by inordinate vanity and love of power, or by mulish obstinacy and hatred or fear of liberty, and it was amazing to hear what arrays of facts he brought forth in support of his thesis. As a general conclusion he, of course, urged that, but for kings and priests, most of the wars of the modern world would never have come about. He did not know which cause was most effective, but inclined to think it was the priests. Certainly the sight of ministers of Christ so-called, unctuously blessing red-handed and red-coated murderers by wholesale, and training their children to go and do likewise, was in his opinion one of the most revolting things under God's sky.