It is possible that in the end your daughter may be better paid, better dressed, more gently spoken, more ladylike than you were in the old mill. You may come to thank God that some Indian, or Chinaman, or negro, or simply some foreigner is doing the work you used to do, and setting your daughter free to do something that is considered much more genteel and is better paid and more respected. Your son may be doing better as a trainer of racehorses than his father did as a steel smelter, and be ever so much more the gentleman. You might, if you lived long enough, see the ugly factory towns of the Manchester and Sheffield and Birmingham districts, and of the Potteries, disappear and be replaced by nice residential towns and pleasure resorts like Bournemouth, Cheltenham, and the Malverns. You might see the valleys of Wales recover the beauty they had before the mines spoiled them. And it would be quite natural for you to call these changes prosperity, and vote for them, and sincerely loathe anyone who warned you that all it meant was that the nation, having become a parasite on foreign labor, was going to the devil as fast as it could. Yet the warning would be much needed. If a nation turns its rough mill hands into well-educated, well-dressed, well-spoken, ladylike mill officials, properly respected, and given a fair share of the wealth they help to produce, the nation is the stronger, the richer, the happier, and the holier for the change. If it turns them into lady’s maids and sellers of twenty-guinea hats, it breaks its own backbone and exchanges its page in honorable history for a chapter in The Ruins of Empires. It becomes too idle and luxurious to be able to compel the foreign countries to pay the tribute on which it lives; and when they cease to feed it, it has lost the art of feeding itself and collapses in the midst of its genteel splendor.