"They would do useful work, Tom," I said. "Your father works from six to six every day, but if all the footmen and chauffeurs and grooms and gamekeepers were doing useful work, your father would only need to work maybe seven hours a day. See? In Britain there are forty millions of people, and the annual income of the country is twenty-four hundred million pounds. One million of people take half this sum, and the other thirty-nine millions have to take the other half." "Please, sir," said Tom, "what half are you in?" "Tom," I said, "I am with the majority. For once the majority has right on its side." * * * Bruce the manufacturer had an advertisement in to-day's local paper. "No encumbrances," says the ad. Bruce has a family of at least a dozen, and he possibly thinks that he has earned the right to talk of "encumbrances." I sympathise with the old chap. But I want to know why gardeners and chauffeurs must have no encumbrances. If the manorial system spreads, a day will come when the only children at this school will be the offspring of the parish minister. Then, I suppose, dominies and ministers will be compelled to be polygamists by Act of Parliament. I like the Lord of the Manor's damned impudence. He breeds cattle for showing, he breeds pheasants for slaughtering, he breeds children to heir his estates. Then he sits down and pens an advertisement for a slave without "encumbrances." Why he doesn't import a few harem attendants from Turkey I don't know; possibly he is waiting till the Dardanelles are opened up. * * * I have just been reading a few schoolboy howlers. I fancy that most of these howlers are manufactured. I cannot be persuaded that any boy ever defined a lie as "An abomination unto the Lord but a very present help in time of trouble." Howlers bore me; so do most school yarns. The only one worth remembering is the one about the inspector who was ratty. "Here, boy," he fired at a sleepy youth, "who wrote _Hamlet_?" The boy started violently. "P--please, sir, it wasna me," he stammered. That evening the inspector was dining with the local squire. "Very funny thing happened to-day," he said, as they lit their cigars. "I was a little bit irritated, and I shouted at a boy, 'Who wrote _Hamlet_?' The little chap was flustered. 'P--please, sir, it wasna me!' he stuttered." The squire guffawed loudly. "And I suppose the little devil had done it after all!" he roared. * * * Lawson came down to see me to-night, and as usual we talked shop. "It's all very well," he said, "for you to talk about education being all wrong. Any idiot can burn down a house that took many men to build. Have you got a definite scheme to put in its place?" The question was familiar to me. I had had it fired at me scores of times in the days when I talked Socialism from a soap-box in Hyde Park.