On both estates the wretchedness is equal, though the character of it is different. Lord Marney rules in a country district. A clergyman asks him how a peasant can rear his family on eight shillings a week. 'Oh, as for that,' said Lord Marney, 'I have generally found the higher the wages, the worse the workmen. They only spend their money in the beershops. They are the curse of the country.' The ruins of the monastery give an opportunity for a contrast between the old England and the new, by a picture of the time when the monks were the gentlest of landlords, when exactions and evictions were unknown, and when churches were raised to the service of God in the same spots where now rise the brick chimneys and factories as the spires and temples of the modern Mammon-worship. In Mowbray, the town from which the earl of that name drew his revenue, the inhabitants were losing the elementary virtues of humanity. Factory-girls deserted their parents, and left them to starve, preferring an independence of vice and folly; mothers farmed out their children at threepence a week to be got rid of in a month or two by laudanum and treacle. Disraeli was startled to find that 'infanticide was practised as extensively and legally in England as it was on the banks of the Ganges.' It is the same to-day: occasional revelations lift the curtains, and show it active as ever; familiarity has led us to look upon it as inevitable; the question, what is to be done with the swarms of children multiplying in our towns, admitting, at present, of no moral solution. With some elaboration, Disraeli describes the human creatures bred in such places which were growing up to take the place of the old English. 'Devilsdust'--so one of these children came to be called, for he had no legitimate name or parentage--having survived a baby-farm by toughness of constitution, and the weekly threepence ceasing on his mother's death, was turned out into the streets to starve or to be run over.