Lancelot might as well have held his tongue--nobody understood him but Vieuxbois, and he had been taught to scent German neology in everything, as some folks are taught to scent Jesuitry, especially when it involved an inductive law, and not a mere red-tape precedent, and, therefore, could not see that Lancelot was arguing for him. 'All very fine, Smith,' said the squire; 'it's a pity you won't leave off puzzling your head with books, and stick to fox- hunting. All you young gentlemen will do is to turn the heads of the poor with your cursed education.' The national oath followed, of course. 'Pictures and chanting! Why, when I was a boy, a good honest labouring man wanted to see nothing better than a halfpenny ballad, with a wood-cut at the top, and they worked very well then, and wanted for nothing.' 'Oh, we shall give them the halfpenny ballads in time!' said Vieuxbois, smiling. 'You will do a very good deed, then,' said mine host. 'But I am sorry to say that, as far as I can find from my agents, when the upper classes write cheap publications, the lower classes will not read them.' 'Too true,' said Vieuxbois. 'Is not the cause,' asked Lancelot, 'just that the upper classes do write them?' 'The writings of working men, certainly,' said Lord Minchampstead, 'have an enormous sale among their own class.' 'Just because they express the feelings of that class, of which I am beginning to fear that we know very little. Look again, what a noble literature of people's songs and hymns Germany has. Some of Lord Vieuxbois's friends, I know, are busy translating many of them.' 'As many of them, that is to say,' said Vieuxbois, 'as are compatible with a real Church spirit.' 'Be it so; but who wrote them? Not the German aristocracy for the people, but the German people for themselves. There is the secret of their power. Why not educate the people up to such a standard that they should be able to write their own literature?' 'What,' said Mr. Chalklands, of Chalklands, who sat opposite, 'would you have working men turn ballad writers? There would be an end of work, then, I think.' 'I have not heard,' said Lancelot, 'that the young women--LADIES, I ought to say, if the word mean anything--who wrote the "Lowell Offering," spun less or worse cotton than their neighbours.' 'On the contrary," said Lord Minchampstead, 'we have the most noble accounts of heroic industry and self-sacrifice in girls whose education, to judge by its fruits, might shame that of most English young ladies.' Mr. Chalklands expressed certain confused notions that, in America, factory girls carried green silk parasols, put the legs of pianos into trousers, and were too prudish to make a shirt, or to call it a shirt after it was made, he did not quite remember which.