Mrs. Duff-Scott, being thus deprived of all her children, and finding china no longer the substantial comfort to her that it used to be, has fulfilled her husband's darkest predictions and "gone in" for philanthropy. In London she served a short but severe apprenticeship to that noble cause which seeks to remove the curse of past ignorance and cruelty from those to whom it has come down in hereditary entail--those on whose unhappy and degraded lives all the powers of evil held mortgages (to quote a thoughtful writer) before ever the deeds were put into their hands--and who are now preached at and punished for the crimes that, not they, but their tyrants of the past committed. She took a lesson in that new political economy which is to the old science what the spirit of modern religion is to the ecclesiasticism which has been its unwilling mother, and has learned that the rich _are_ responsible for the poor--that, let these interesting debating clubs that call themselves the people's parliaments say what they like, the moral of the great social problem is that the selfishness of the past must be met by unselfishness in the present, if any of us would hope to see good days in the future. "It will not do," says Mrs. Duff-Scott to her clergyman, who deplores the dangerous opinions that she has imbibed, "to leave these matters to legislation. Of what use is legislation? Here are a lot of ignorant, vain men who know nothing about it, fighting with one another for what they can get, and the handful amongst them who are really anxious for the public good are left nowhere in the scrimmage. It is _we_ who must put our shoulders to the wheel, my dear sir--and the sooner we set about it the better. Look at the state of Europe"--she waves her hand abroad--"and see what things are coming to! The very heart of those countries is being eaten out by the cancer-growths of Nihilism and all sorts of dreadful isms, because the poor are getting educated to understand _why_ they are so poor. Look at wealthy England, with more than a million paupers, and millions and millions that are worse than paupers--England is comparatively quiet and orderly under it, and why? Because a number of good people like Mr. Yelverton"--the clergyman shakes his head at the mention of this wicked sinner's name--"have given themselves up to struggle honestly and face to face with the evils that nothing but a self-sacrificing and independent philanthropy can touch. I believe that if England escapes the explosion of this fermenting democracy, which is brewing such a revolution as the world has never seen, it will be owing to neither Church nor State--unless Church and State both mend their ways considerably--but to the self-denying work that is being done outside of them by those who have a single-hearted desire to help, to _really_ help, their wronged and wretched fellow-creatures."