His listeners felt uncomfortable when he was speaking, and resentful when he had finished. Many of them were hard hit themselves by the slump in mining and the increased taxation. Many were helping those hard cases with which they came in contact, and if that barely touched the fringe of the distress they did not see that Ross was doing any more. What they were not prepared to accept was that they had any sort of liability for the hardships of the day, or that laws could be framed to offer some less soul-destroying form of relief than the poorhouse and the parish cart. Even Francis could not
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