One more egotistical, or egoistical, remark, and I proceed. I am in no sense a _specialist_. I am neither a Good Templar nor a Convivial Toper; neither a disciple of Nihilism, nor any other school of advanced thought (so called), nor a bigoted sectarian. I am a private in neither the ranks of bovine Toryism nor of rabid Radicalism; but I write simply as one of that common ruck of ordinary practical working men, which in reality forms the great staple of our plebiscite, although certain very noisy and turbulent minorities may possibly have led to a contrary inference. In the erection of my little structure, I, like all other architects, require a good foundation as the basis of operations; and in the present case the foundation required is simply a desire on the part of those bipeds who stand erect on pedestals for an increased knowledge of their fellows who crawl and kneel and lie in a thousand and one contorted postures on the miry clay. Enlarged knowledge will bring enlarged sympathy for each other on the part of high and low alike. As matters now stand, those above us never really see us in undress. When they come across us we are either too slavishly sycophantic or too ruggedly independent,--both being masks donned for the occasion,--and not in any sense our natural selves; and I have a dim kind of suspicion that on the few occasions when gentlemen voluntarily come forward and try to make us believe that they are taking us into their confidence--on the hustings, say, for instance--some disguise of the same kind may be adopted, and that the features we then see are not altogether the real ones. If I am right in this assumption, how is it possible for either class to have anything like a competent knowledge of the other? Indeed, I do not think I should be far wrong in saying that the manners and customs of the Fijian Islanders and other aborigines of distant lands are better known generally to the upper ten thousand than those of the lower native millions; and, of course, the converse holds equally good. Domestic servants, perhaps, may be said to form exceptions to this latter rule, seeing that they often have peeps into the innermost arcana; but as they are for the most part--the male portion of them at all events--more utterly inexplicable beings than their masters, the general fund of information is not much increased through that channel. Flunkeydom is much more insufferable and incomprehensible to the general run of us than swelldom itself.