They said, `To hell with everything and everyone,' and they cared for nothing so long as they could get plenty of beer.
The occupants of Nimrod's coach have already been described and most of them may correctly be classed as being similar to cretin idiots of the third degree - very cunning and selfish, and able to read and write, but with very little understanding of what they read except on the most common topics.
As for those who rode with Harlow in the last coach, most of them, as has been already intimated, were men of similar character to himself.
The greater number of them fairly good workmen and - unlike the boozers in Crass's coach - not yet quite heartbroken, but still continuing the hopeless struggle against poverty.These differed from Nimrod's lot inasmuch as they were not content.They were always complaining of their wretched circumstances, and found a certain kind of pleasure in listening to the tirades of the Socialists against the existing social conditions, and professing their concurrence with many of the sentiments expressed, and a desire to bring about a better state of affairs.
Most of them appeared to be quite sane, being able to converse intelligently on any ordinary subject without discovering any symptoms of mental disorder, and it was not until the topic of Parliamentary elections was mentioned that evidence of their insanity was forthcoming.It then almost invariably appeared that they were subject to the most extraordinary hallucinations and extravagant delusions, the commonest being that the best thing that the working people could do to bring about an improvement in their condition, was to continue to elect their Liberal and Tory employers to make laws for and to rule over them! At such times, if anyone ventured to point out to them that that was what they had been doing all their lives, and referred them to the manifold evidences that met them wherever they turned their eyes of its folly and futility, they were generally immediately seized with a paroxysm of the most furious mania, and were with difficulty prevented from savagely assaulting those who differed from them.
They were usually found in a similar condition of maniacal excitement for some time preceding and during a Parliamentary election, but afterwards they usually manifested that modification of insanity which is called melancholia.In fact they alternated between these two forms of the disease.During elections, the highest state of exalted mania; and at ordinary times - presumably as a result of reading about the proceedings in Parliament of the persons whom they had elected -in a state of melancholic depression, in their case an instance of hope deferred making the heart sick.
This condition occasionally proved to be the stage of transition into yet another modification of the disease - that known as dipsomania, the phase exhibited by Bill Bates and the Semi-drunk.