ave been amused to see how zealously Sir
John and Lady Jane and Miss Jeanette talked together at the _table
d'hote_ for a week, never by accident speaking to Mr. Williams, Mrs.
Williams, and Miss Williamina, who sat next them. This is not inability
to condescend, however. The Ws are as unwilling to speak to the Js. This
difficulty is the same difficulty which Mr. Litchfield describes in an
account of his "Five Years' Teaching at Working-Men's College." "When a
man first comes to our college," he says, "he is apt to walk into his
class-room in the solemn and discreet manner befitting an entry into a
public institution, and generally for a night or two will persist in
regarding his teacher as a severely official personage, whose dignity is
not to be lightly trifled with. Now nothing, I believe, can really be
done, till this notion is extinguished,--till teacher and students have
got to understand each other, and have agreed to banish the foolish
_mauvaise honte_ which makes every Englishman shy of talking to a
fellow-creature. The freer the colloquial intercourse between teacher
and students, the more is learned in the time. To establish this is not
easy; but harder still is the task of setting the students on a familiar
footing with each other. There seems to be _some impassable obstacle to
the fraternization of a dozen Londoners_, though sitting side by side,
week after week, doing the same work." The truth being, that the dozen
Londoners might belong to twelve different castes. And just as in "the
Rifle Movement" the clerks in the Queen's civil service could not serve
in the same battalion with architects' clerks on the one hand, or
students at law on the other,--you may have, in your algebra class,
a goldsmith who is afraid of being snobbish if he speaks to a
map-engraver, or a tailor who does not presume to address an opinion on
Archimedes' square to a piano-forte maker.

But the Brahmin and the Sudra may both be converted to Christianity. In
that case, though it seems very odd to both, the distinction of caste
goes to the wall. And the "knot of parsons and such like," spoken of
above, having, very fortunately for the world, been born into the
Christian Church, made it, as we have seen, their business to face the
difficulty because of the necessity,--and the Working-Men's College is
the result of their endeavor. Mr. Maurice himself took the first step.
Before the College itself was opened, he undertook a Bible-class.