e presented to
you, varnished out of all likeness to the truth by the suave periods of
writer or speaker. But there is something tragically stupid about your
dogged acceptation of any social construction of a private life, damned
out of all possibility of redemption by the flippant deductions of
chatter-box or of slanderer.

Now and then you poor humanities, who are always so dimly conscious that
you are all lies to one another, get a glimpse of various truths from
some cynical dead man's diary, or some statesman's secret papers. But
you never are warned: you placidly continue greedily to gobble up,
unexamined, the falsehoods of public men; and impudently to adjudicate
on the unrevealed secrets of private lives.

* * *

You are given, very continually, to denouncing or lamenting the gradual
encroachment of mob-rule. But, alas! whose fault, pray, is it that
bill-discounters dwell as lords in ancient castles; that money-lenders
reign over old, time-honoured lands; that low-born hirelings dare to
address their master with a grin and sneer, strong in the knowledge of
his shameful secrets; and that the vile daughters of the populace are
throned in public places, made gorgeous with the jewels which, from the
heirlooms of a great patriciate, have fallen to be the gew-gaws of a
fashionable infamy?

Ah, believe me, an aristocracy is a feudal fortress which, though it has
merciless beleaguers in the Jacquerie of plebeian Envy, has yet no foe
so deadly as its own internal traitor of Lost Dignity!

* * *

"But ye dunna get good wage?" said the miner, with practical wisdom.

"We doan't," confessed the East Anglian, "we doan't. And that theer
botherin' machinery as do the threshin', and the reapin', and the
sawin', and the mowin', hev a ruined us. See!--in old time, when ground
was frost-bit or water-soaked, the min threshed in-doors, in barns, and
kep in work so. But now the machine, he dew all theer is to dew, and dew
it up so quick. Theer's a many more min than theer be things to dew. In
winter-time measter he doan't want half o' us; and we're just out o'
labour; and we fall sick, cos o' naethin' to eat; and goes tew
parish--able-bodied min strong as steers."

"Machine's o' use i' mill-work," suggested one of the northerners.

"O' use! ay, o' coorse 'tis o' use--tew tha measters," growled the East
Anglian. "But if ye warn't needed at yer mill cos the iron beast was a
weavin' and a r