e idea that the moral prohibitions and sanctions,
the privileges and concessions, the conception of property and
responsibility, of comfort and beauty, that had rendered the mainly
agricultural states of the past prosperous and happy, would fail in the
rising torrent of novel opportunities and novel stimulations, never
seems to have entered the nineteenth-century mind. That a citizen,
kindly and fair in his ordinary life, could as a shareholder become
almost murderously greedy; that commercial methods that were reasonable
and honourable on the old-fashioned countryside, should on an enlarged
scale be deadly and overwhelming; that ancient charity was modern
pauperisation, and ancient employment modern sweating; that, in fact, a
revision and enlargement of the duties and rights of man had become
urgently necessary, were things it could not entertain, nourished as it
was on an archaic system of education and profoundly retrospective and
legal in all its habits of thought. It was known that the accumulation
of men in cities involved unprecedented dangers of pestilence; there was
an energetic development of sanitation; but that the diseases of
gambling and usury, of luxury and tyranny should become endemic, and
produce horrible consequences was beyond the scope of nineteenth-century
thought. And so, as if it were some inorganic process, practically
unhindered by the creative will of man, the growth of the swarming
unhappy cities that mark the twenty-first century accomplished itself.

The new society was divided into three main classes. At the summit
slumbered the property owner, enormously rich by accident rather than
design, potent save for the will and aim, the last _avatar_ of Hamlet in
the world. Below was the enormous multitude of workers employed by the
gigantic companies that monopolised control; and between these two the
dwindling middle class, officials of innumerable sorts, foremen,
managers, the medical, legal, artistic, and scholastic classes, and the
minor rich, a middle class whose members led a life of insecure luxury
and precarious speculation amidst the movements of the great managers.

Already the love story and the marrying of two persons of this middle
class have been told: how they overcame the obstacles between them, and
how they tried the simple old-fashioned way of living on the countryside
and came back speedily enough into the city of London. Denton had no
means, so Elizabeth borrowed money on the