Beset, as they are, by all the external difficulties of poverty, men like Bettesworth have little inclination and less leisure for philosophising. There is always something practical for them to be at. They need no systems of the universe to point out to them their duty. Their virtue is traditional; practised rather than spoken of—or else it springs warm and spontaneous out of the racial force within them. Less than most men are they pedants. What they do, they do because they must, or because it pleases them; not because it agrees with some thought-out and conscious rule.

Still, Bettesworth has a sort of philosophy of his own; very short, yet highly characteristic of the man. “To know Right and Wrong”—the thing seems simple to him. Unlike the student of morals, he is visited by no distracting doubts as to which is which. He lays down this law as one half of the whole duty of man, and promptly goes on to enunciate the other half. The doctrine as completed is at least a strong one. True, as a guide to conduct, it cannot be of much use; but then Bettesworth, I strongly suspect, has rarely tried to use it so. He keeps it rather to comfort him after the act; not to tell him what to do, but to justify what he has done. It is his explanation of his own hard-fisted but upstanding and honourable life.