The Fool of the Family, by John Dangerfield

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER m. A PANIC IN PHILISTIA. It was the dull season. Parliament had been up two months. There was not that stir in the political, literary, and artistic world which precedes Christmas; and yet the souls of men were vexed within them. There was an upheaval of some latent grievance against some one of our great time-honoured institutions; some cause for apprehension was suddenly, by an accidental lucidity of some exponent of it, brought to the comprehension of the masses; some old exploded problem was for the moment revived, some dilemma long since evoked and laid at rest was again brought to the light. It matters not to the interest of this story what was the particular cause for alarm or indignation; whether we had suddenly awoke to the conviction that our navalsupremacy was slipping away, the French or the Germans coming to invade us, or our food systematically poisoned, and every one of us dying slowly of occult symptoms. It was one of our periodical panics, and it was this time a serious one; and coming in November, it was no small cause of rejoicing to newspaper men. When the great apoplectic class has begun to stir itself in any matter, something is likely to come of it; when groups of red-faced men get together in clubs and in drawing-rooms, at Tattersall's, in City streets, and on Exchanges, and appear to be literally bursting with some grievance; when the neckties of stout gentlemen in first-class railway carriages perceptibly tighten, as they read apoplectic leading articles in the daily papers, then let the world be prepared?some great change is imminent in this England of ours. In this particular case the grievance was jeal; the indignation, though excessive, not quite unfounded. The matter was a somewhat abstruse one. One weekly newspaper of standing ...