If you are astonished at the luxury in the house of the Neys, what will you say when I tell you that in this country every simple worker lives essentially as our hosts do? The villas merely have fewer rooms, the furniture is plainer; instead of keeping saddle-horses of their own, the simple workers hire those belonging to the Transport Association; less money is spent upon objects of art, books, and for benevolent purposes: these are the only differences. Take, for instance, our neighbour Moro. Though an ordinary overseer in the Eden Vale Paint-making Association, he and his charming wife are among the intimate friends of our host, and we have already several times dined in his neat and comfortable seven-roomed house. Even 'pupil-daughters' are not lacking in his house, for his wife enjoys--and justly, as I can testify--the reputation of possessing a special amount of mental and moral culture; and, as you know, pupil-daughters choose not the great house, but the superior housewife. And if it should strike you as remarkable that such a Phoenix of a woman should be the wife of a simple factory-hand, you must remember that the workers of Freeland are different from those of Europe. Here everybody enjoys sound secondary education; and that a young man becomes an artisan and not a teacher, or a physician, or engineer, or such like, is due to the fact that he does not possess, or thinks he does not possess, any _exceptional_ intellectual capacity. For in this country the intellectual professions can be successfully carried on only by those who possess exceptional natural qualifications, since the competition of _all_ who are really qualified makes it impossible for the imperfectly qualified to succeed. Among ourselves, where only an infinitely small proportion of the population has the opportunity of studying, the lack of means among the immense majority secures a privilege even to the blockheads among the fortunate possessors of means. The rich cannot all be persons of talent any more than all the poor can. Since we, however, notwithstanding this, supply our demand for intellectual workers--apart, of course, from those exceptional cases which occur everywhere--solely from the small number of sons of rich families, we are fortunate if we find one capable student among ten incapables; of which ten--since the one capable student cannot supply all our demand--at most only two or three of the greatest blockheads suffer shipwreck. Here, on the contrary, where everyone has the opportunity of studying, there are, of course, very many more capable students; consequently the Freelanders do not need to go nearly so low down as we do in the scale of capacity to cover their demand for intellectual workers. It does not necessarily follow that their cleverest men are cleverer than ours; but our incapables--among the graduates--are much, much more incapable than the least capable of theirs can possibly be. What would be of medium quality among us is here