England were not popular it could not exist; and titled Mayors would cease to be returned by popular constituencies. If on the other hand the municipal compliments failed to bring with them to their recipients an opportunity of usefulness as well as a sense of honour, they would not be accepted. The plain historical truth is that the patrician landowners of England have recognized the opportunity of removing the remnant of traditional estrangement between themselves and the masses of their countrymen of which so much was heard during the years immediately following the new Poor Law of half a century since. Of that sentiment, little known except by hearsay to the present generation, the most vivid, and not the least trustworthy record is still to be found in a fiction already mentioned in these pages, Mr Disraeli's _Sibyl_. Nothing but reciprocal good can come of these relations between the classes and the masses, to apply to them the distinguishing terms used by Mr Gladstone. An apprenticeship to the routine work of municipal affairs in view of the changed subject matter of the questions of the day is more likely to prove practically serviceable for those born into the condition of hereditary statesmen than a course of diplomatic lounging in the Courts and Chanceries of the world, or even than the grand tour which now extends from Calcutta in one direction to Chicago in another. The class fusion that is so signally the social product of the present reign has culminated in the conditions which, in the fulness of time, legislation has rather recognized than produced. Long before provincial self government was established upon the lines indicated by the Acts of 1888 and 1894, the spirit which in 1867 prompted Edward Denison to take up his dwelling in Whitechapel had been exemplified by philanthropists of both sexes in London and elsewhere. The sister of Mr Chamberlain is one of several ladies at Birmingham who systematically co-operated for purposes of house to house visiting in the poorest quarters of the town that they might practically instruct the wives and daughters of working men in the arts of domestic management, and in the possibility of keeping the humblest homes happy, healthy, comfortable and clean. Similar organizations have done a like work in Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, and no doubt in all our great centres of population.[31] CHAPTER X THE SOCIAL FUSING AND ORGANIZING OF THE TWO NATIONS OF 'SIBYL'