d Aldermen must have
come from very humble beginnings. Even then, however, we find on
investigation that the city fathers of that time had mostly sprung
from small shops. They were never, to begin with, craftsmen, and at
the end of the century any such rise was never dreamed of by the most
ambitious. The clerk, if a lad became a clerk, remained a clerk: he
had no hope of becoming anything else. The shopman remained a shopman,
his only hope being the establishment of himself as a master if he
could save enough money. The craftsman remained a craftsman. And for
partnerships there were always plenty--younger sons and others--eager
to buy themselves in, or there were sons and nephews waiting their
turn. No son of a working man, or a clerk, could hope for any other
advancement in the City than advancement to higher salary for long and
faithful service.

Once more, then, the situation was this: To him who could afford to
earn nothing till he was two-and-twenty, and little till he was
five-and-twenty, and could find the money for fees, lectures, and
courses and coaches, everything that the country had to offer was
open. With this limitation there was never any country in which prizes
were more open than Great Britain and Ireland. A clever lad might
enter the Royal Engineers or Artillery with a tolerable certainty of
being a Colonel and a K.C.B. at fifty; or he might go into the Church
where if he had ability and had cultivated eloquence and possessed
good manners, he might count on a Bishopric; or he might go to the
Bar, where, if he was lucky, he might become a judge or even Lord
Chancellor. Unless, however, he could provide the capital wanted for
admission, he could attain to nothing--nothing--nothing.

What became, then, of the clever lad? In some cases he became a clerk,
crowding into a trade already overcrowded. He trampled on his
competitors, because most of them, the sons and grandsons of clerks,
had no ambition and no perception of the things wanted. This young
fellow had. He taught himself the things that were wanted; he
generally took therefore the best place. But he had to remain a clerk.

Or, more often, he became a teacher in a Board School. In this
capacity he obtained a certain amount of social consideration, a
certain amount of independence, and an income varying From L150 to
L400 a year.

Or, which also happened frequently, he might become a dissenting
minister of the humbler kind. In that case he had eve