--Ogi, wishing to make sure about this point, goes to the source of all information on the subject of refinement in sex matters. “Tell me,” he says, “if you were to die, would it be indelicate of me to marry one of your younger sisters?” Mrs. Ogi, who has never read the Mosaic code, and is not learned in the Victorian lunacies, looks at her husband with a puzzled expression. “I helped to raise my sisters,” she says. “Surely any wife would want to leave her husband in safe hands!” CHAPTER LXXII GOD SAVE THE PEOPLE In the first half of this nineteenth century the British factory system came to maturity; the capitalist class took charge of society, and forced the working class into a condition of degradation hitherto unknown upon this planet. The class struggle took definite shape--Chartist agitations and suffrage reform bills and Corn Law riots--and there arose in England a man of genius to tell about the wrongs of the people from his own first-hand experience. His father was a wretchedly paid government clerk, who had no acquaintance with the birth control movement. Charles Dickens was one of eight half-starved children, and went to work at the age of ten in a filthy, ramshackle blacking factory. The cruelties he there experienced stamped his soul for life, and helped to make the radical movement of the English-speaking world. Later on he got a chance to go to school, and became a court stenographer and newspaper reporter, and saw the insides of ruling-class rascality. He began writing humorous sketches which turned into the “Pickwick Papers,” and so at the age of twenty-four he was carried up into a golden cloud of glory. World fame and success were his for the balance of his life; but he never entirely forgot the meaning of his early days, and remained to some extent an apostle of the poor and oppressed.