The change in Tom’s opinions and objects of interest brought him now into more intimate relations with a set of whom he had as yet seen little. For want of a better name, we may call them “the party of progress.” At their parties, instead of practical jokes, and boisterous mirth, and talk of boats, and bats, and guns, and horses, the highest and deepest questions of morals, and politics, and metaphysics, were discussed, and discussed with a freshness and enthusiasm which is apt to wear off when doing has to take the place of talking, but has a strange charm of its own while it lasts, and is looked back to with loving regret by those for whom it is no longer a possibility. With this set Tom soon fraternized, and drank in many new ideas, and took to himself also many new crotchets besides those with which he was really weighted. Almost all his new acquaintances were Liberal in politics, but a few only were ready to go all lengths with him. They were all Union men, and Tom, of course, followed the fashion, and soon propounded theories in that institution which gained him the name of Chartist Brown. There was a strong mixture of self-conceit in it all. He had a kind of idea that he had discovered something which it was creditable to have discovered, and that it was a very fine thing to have all these feelings for, and sympathies with, “the masses,” and to believe in democracy, and “glorious humanity,” and “a good time coming,” and I know not what other big matters. And, although it startled and pained him at first to hear himself called ugly names, which he had hated and despised from his youth up, and to know that many of his old acquaintances looked upon him, not simply as a madman, but as a madman with snobbish proclivities; yet, when the first plunge was over, there was a good deal on the other hand which tickled his vanity, and was far from being unpleasant. To do him justice, however, the disagreeables were such that, had there not been some genuine belief at the bottom, he would certainly have been headed back very speedily into the fold of political and social orthodoxy. As it was, amidst the cloud of sophisms, and platitudes, and big one-sided ideas half-mastered, which filled his thoughts and overflowed in his talk, there was growing in him and taking firmer hold on him daily a true and broad sympathy for men as men, and especially for poor men as poor men, and a righteous and burning hatred against all laws, customs, or notions, which, according to his light, either were or seemed to be setting aside, or putting anything else in the place of, or above the man. It was with him the natural outgrowth of the child’s and boy’s training (though his father would have been much astonished to be told so), and the instincts of those early days were now getting rapidly set into habits and faiths, and becoming a part of himself.