He wrote this because he was in a towering rage at the manner in which he had been addressed. Perhaps at some other moment, or if addressed more humbly, he might have bought off these men as he had previously bought off others; but this letter had come to him in an hour when he was filled with vainglory and self-satisfaction. Only the previous day he had been at a banquet given him by the Conservatives of the county he represented. His blood was still warm, his vanity still fermenting like yeast, at the memory of the compliments paid to him by the great personages present; the praises of his glorious self-made position, the homage offered to him in the name of Great Britain. The Leader of the House had given him to understand that when there was next any vacancy or change he would be offered a place in the administration; the great county folks at the county banquet had heaped adulation upon him, for they wanted him to make a new short-route railway line to London; the _Times_ newspaper had had a leader consecrated to himself and to his admirable promise as a future chief in the political world. And in such a moment of supreme distinction a platelayer and a lamp-cleaner dared to write to him that he had been always a “blackgud”! Acute as his mind was, and vast as had been the sums which he had expended in shipping his own and his wife’s people to Australia, so as not to be annoyed by their demands or vicinity, he should have been willing to spend the insignificant sum which would have pensioned and quieted Robert Airley; he should also have given something to the Suffolk lamp-cleaner and thanked him; both men would have praised him in the city where his fortune had been first made. But the wrath which was in him for once clouded his keen perception; he would not have given either of the poor devils a crust of bread to save their life or his own. The survival of the strongest was the law of nature; he had heard a sociologist say so. Even beasts in the woods followed that rule; the bison and the opossum and the jaguar and the bear deferred to that law. How should men defy or dare to demur to it? Because a weak sawney of a long-limbed emigrant had not owned brains enough to see what was under the soil which had been given him, could he blame a keener and stronger man, already on the soil, for having had the wit to know what ore was hidden under the rank grass and the juniper scrub? Clearly, no. Fortune favored those who helped themselves. “A blackgud in all ways”! Did a wretched railway hand dare to write this to a colossus of finance whose brain was shrewder and whose pile was bigger than those of any man on the Corporation of London? William Massarene felt as a Burmese Buddha, hung with gold and jewels, may be supposed to feel when a Cook’s tourist pokes at him with the brass ferule of an umbrella.