"What I say. What is the use? There she is in her sphere of life, the daughter of a factory operative, in all probability in after-years to be the wife of one and the mother of others. Nothing but a rich marriage can save her, and that she is not likely to make. Milk-maids are more likely to make rich marriages than factory girls; there is a certain savor of romance about milk, and the dewy meadows, and the breath of kine, but a shoe factory is brutally realistic and illusionary. Now, why do you want to increase the poor child's horizon farther than her little feet can carry her? Fit her to be a good female soldier in the ranks of labor, to be a good wife and mother to the makers of shoes, to wash and iron their uniforms of toil, to cook well the food which affords them the requisite nourishment to make shoes, to appreciate book-lore, which is a pleasure and a profit to the makers of shoes; possibly in the non-event of marriage she will make shoes herself. The system of education in our schools is all wrong. It is both senseless and futile. Look at the children filing past to school, and look at their fathers, and their mothers too, filing past to the factory. Look at their present, and look at their future. And look at the trash taught them in their text-books--trash from its utter dissociation with their lives. You might as well teach a Zulu lace-work, instead of the use of the assagai." "Now look here, Mr. Risley," said the school-master, his face flushing, "is not--I beg your pardon, of course--this view of yours a little narrow and ultra-conservative? You do not want to establish a permanent factory-operative class in this country, do you? That is what your theory would ultimately tend towards. Ought not these children be given their chance to rise in the ranks; ought they to be condemned to tread in the same path as their fathers?" "I would have those little paths which intersect every unoccupied field in this locality worn by the feet of these men and their children after them unto the third and fourth generation," said Risley. "If not, where is our skilled labor?" "Oh, Mr. Risley," said Mrs. Lloyd, anxiously, "you wouldn't want all those dear little children to work as hard as their fathers, and not do any better, would you?" "If they don't, who is going to make our shoes, dear Mrs. Lloyd?" asked Risley. Mrs. Lloyd and the school-master stared at him, and Lloyd laughed his low, almost mirthless laugh. "Don't you know, Edward," he said, "that Mr. Risley is not in earnest, and speaks with the deadly intent of an anarchist with a bomb in his bag? He is the most out-and-out radical in the country. If there were a strike, and I did not yield to the demands of the oppressed, and imported foreign labor, I don't know that my life would be safe from him." "Then you do approve of a higher education?" asked the school-master, while Mrs. Lloyd stared from one to the other in bewilderment.