es. There is the secret
of their power. Why not educate the people up to such a standard
that they should be able to write their own literature?'

'What,' said Mr. Chalklands, of Chalklands, who sat opposite, 'would
you have working men turn ballad writers? There would be an end of
work, then, I think.'

'I have not heard,' said Lancelot, 'that the young women--LADIES, I
ought to say, if the word mean anything--who wrote the "Lowell
Offering," spun less or worse cotton than their neighbours.'

'On the contrary," said Lord Minchampstead, 'we have the most noble
accounts of heroic industry and self-sacrifice in girls whose
education, to judge by its fruits, might shame that of most English
young ladies.'

Mr. Chalklands expressed certain confused notions that, in America,
factory girls carried green silk parasols, put the legs of pianos
into trousers, and were too prudish to make a shirt, or to call it a
shirt after it was made, he did not quite remember which.

'It is a great pity,' said Lord Minchampstead, 'that our factory
girls are not in the same state of civilisation. But it is socially
impossible. America is in an abnormal state. In a young country
the laws of political economy do not make themselves fully felt.
Here, where we have no uncleared world to drain the labour-market,
we may pity and alleviate the condition of the working-classes, but
we can do nothing more. All the modern schemes for the amelioration
which ignore the laws of competition, must end either in
pauperisation'--(with a glance at Lord Vieuxbois),--'or in the
destruction of property.'

Lancelot said nothing, but thought the more. It did strike him at
the moment that the few might, possibly, be made for the many, and
not the many for the few; and that property was made for man, not
man for property. But he contented himself with asking,--

'You think, then, my lord, that in the present state of society, no
dead-lift can be given to the condition--in plain English, the
wages--of working men, without the destruction of property?'

Lord Minchampstead smiled, and parried the question.

'There may be other dead-lift ameliorations, my young friend,
besides a dead-lift of wages.'

So Lancelot thought, also; but Lord Minchampstead would have been a
little startled could he have seen Lancelot's notion of a dead-lift.
Lord Minchampstead was thinking of cheap bread and sugar. Do you
think that I will te