He was a lodger,
and lodgers were not as yet trusted with the franchise. And he had
ideas, which he himself admitted to be very raw, as to the injustice
of the manner in which he was paid for his work. So much a folio,
without reference to the way in which his work was done, without
regard to the success of his work, with no questions asked of
himself, was, as he thought, no proper way of remunerating a man for
his labours. He had long since joined a Trade Union, and for two
years past had paid a subscription of a shilling a week towards its
funds. He longed to be doing some battle against his superiors, and
to be putting himself in opposition to his employers;--not that he
objected personally to Messrs. Foolscap, Margin, and Vellum, who
always made much of him as a useful man;--but because some such
antagonism would be manly, and the fighting of some battle would
be the right thing to do. "If Labour don't mean to go to the wall
himself," Bunce would say to his wife, "Labour must look alive, and
put somebody else there."
Mrs. Bunce was a comfortable motherly woman, who loved her husband
but hated politics. As he had an aversion to his superiors in the
world because they were superiors, so had she a liking for them for
the same reason. She despised people poorer than herself, and thought
it a fair subject for boasting that her children always had meat for
dinner.
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