ust be admitted, a most estimable class of men and most useful. I
find that the London dustman earns more than an assistant master under
the Salford School Board, and, besides his wages, he picks up many
trifles. The dustman may dwell with his family in two rooms at
three-and-sixpence per week; his equipment consists of a slop,
corduroys, and a sou'-wester hat, which are sufficient to last many a
day with little washing. But the assistant, whose education alone cost
the nation one hundred pounds cash down, not to speak of his own
private expenditure, must live in a respectable locality, dress
neatly, and keep clear of that ugly soul-killing worry which is
inflicted by trouble about money. Decidedly the dustman has the best
of the bargain all round, for, to say the least, he does not need to
labour very much harder than the professional man. This instance tends
to throw a very sinister and significant flash on the way things are
tending. Again, some of the gangs of Shipping Federation men have full
board and lodging, two changes of clothes free, beer and rum in
moderate quantities, and thirty shillings per week. Does anybody in
England know a curate who has a salary like that? I do not think it
would be possible to find one on the Clergy List. No one grudges the
labourers their extra food and high wages; I am only taking note of a
significant social circumstance. The curate earns nothing until he is
about three-and-twenty; if he goes through one of the older
universities, his education costs, up to the time of his going out
into the world, something very like two thousand pounds; yet, with all
his mental equipment, such as it is, he cannot earn so much as a
labourer of his own age. Certainly the humbler classes had their day
of bondage when the middleman bore heavily on them; they got clear by
a mighty effort which dislocated commerce, but we hardly expected to
find them claiming, and obtaining, payments higher than many made to
the most refined products of the universities! It is the way of the
world; we are bound for change, change, and yet more change; and no
man may say how the cycles will widen. Luxury has grown on us since
the thousands of wealthy idlers who draw their money from trade began
to make the stream of lavish expenditure turn into a series of rushing
rapids. The flow of wasted wealth is no longer like the equable
gliding of the full Thames; it is like the long deadly flurry of the
waters that bears toward