While the Respectable remains in this grateful frame nothing can be done for him. You must convince him that Respectability is a species of mania, and until you have done this, there is palpably no hope of curing him. Ridicule, contempt, satire--these are the instruments that you must employ. Scarify him mentally, if you can, with Titanic laughter at his wretched hallucination. Kick his preposterous idol till the sawdust flies out of it; deride it, mutilate it, tear off its flimsy tinsel. You must be prepared for a tussle with the Respectable. He will fight long and savagely for his fetish, for it is the god of his fathers, and he was taught to revere it when he left the cradle. He is fighting for all that he conceives to be most dear and sacred to him, and he looks upon you as an impious iconoclast and a fanatic. To a Respectable, all are mad who seek to destroy illusions, to show the inside of things, and to disencumber the social ground of the tares and thistles that make such a brave show. He loves his world of seems and shams and hypocrisies. Our hope is in the young, in the rising generation, ere they are hopelessly crushed and disfigured beyond all recognition beneath the wheels of Respectability's triumphal one-horse brougham; before their callow brains are dwarfed and warped in Dame Grundy's seminary and in Dr. Birch's select school for the sons of wholesale tea merchants; before the miasma of Villadom has poisoned their morals and befogged their mental vision. Education must be widened and democratized. The principle that "a mon's a mon for a' that" must be inculcated, and true worth of character will then be dissociated in the mind from that vile, tawdry, make-belief virtue called Respectability. CHAPTER III. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. "The snob in soul who looks above, Trampling on what's beneath." FRANCIS ADAMS. "Is she a Lady or a Person?" asked a British Matron when I spoke of a certain young woman. The question is well calculated to set one pondering on those nice distinctions of class, and sub-distinctions within the classes, characteristic of most semi-civilised and so-called highly civilised nations of the world. Unquestionably, my interrogator was a "lady" in the popular sense of the title. She lived in a large house, received visits from the rector and the curate, gave parties attended by well-to-do tradesfolk and one or two professional men, with their wives and families, and refrained from committing the misdemeanour of carrying parcels in the street. Undoubtedly she was considered a lady by most members of her own order. But was she a lady? I confess I do not know what you in particular mean by a lady. I must know you tolerably intimately before I can even hazard a surmise. This dame was the daughter of a tradesman, and she earned her own livelihood. That is quite enough to stamp her as a mere person in the judgment of an immense class.