the preglacial epoch--as, indeed, most of us actually are!' 'But, after all, Herr Schurz,' said Harry, expostulating, 'you get paid for your labour, and the rich man is doing better by encouraging your skill than by encouraging the less useful skill of other workmen.' 'Ah, yes,' cried Herr Schurz, warmly, 'that's the doctrine of the one-eyed economists; that's the capitalist way of looking at it; but it isn't our way--it isn't ours. Is it nothing, think you, that all that toil of mine--of a sensible man's--goes to waste, to gratify the senseless passing whim of a wealthy nobody? Is it nothing that he uselessly monopolises the valuable product of my labour, which in other and abler hands might be bringing forth good fruit for the bettering and furthering of universal humanity? I tell you, Mr. Oswald, half the best books, half the best apparatus, half the best appliances in all Europe, are locked up idle in rich men's cabinets, effecting no good, begetting no discoveries, bringing forth no interest, doing nothing but foster the anti-social pride of their wealthy possessors. But that isn't what friend Ernest wants to ask me about to-day. He wants to know about his own course in a difficult case; and instead of answering him, here am I, maundering away, like an old man that I am, into the generalised platitudes of "Gold and the Proletariate." Well, Le Breton, what I should say in your particular instance is this. A man with the fear of right before his eyes may, under existing circumstances, lawfully accept any work that will keep him alive, provided he sees no better and more useful work equally open to him. He may take the job the capitalists impose, if he can get nothing worthier to do elsewhere. Now, if you don't teach this young Tregellis, what alternative have you? Why, to become a master in a school--Eton, perhaps, or Rugby, or Marlborough--and teach other equally useless members of prospective aristocratic society. That being so, I think you ought to do what's best for yourself and your family for the present--for the present--till the time of deliverance comes. You see, there is one member of your family to whom the matter is of immediate importance.' 'Ronald,' said Ernest, interrupting him. 'Yes, Ronald. A good boy; a socialist, too, though he doesn't know it--one of us, born of us, and only apart from us in bare externals. Well, would it be most comfortable for poor Ronald that you should go to these Exmoor people, or that you should take a mastership, get rooms somewhere, and let him live with you? He's not very happy with your mother, you say. Wouldn't he be happier with you? What think you? Charity begins at home, you know: a good proverb--a good, sound, sensible, narrow-minded, practical English proverb!' 'I've thought of that,' Ernest said, 'and I'll ask him about it. Whichever he prefers, then, I'd better decide upon, had I?'