'It is a great pity,' said Lord Minchampstead, 'that our factory girls are not in the same state of civilisation. But it is socially impossible. America is in an abnormal state. In a young country the laws of political economy do not make themselves fully felt. Here, where we have no uncleared world to drain the labour-market, we may pity and alleviate the condition of the working-classes, but we can do nothing more. All the modern schemes for the amelioration which ignore the laws of competition, must end either in pauperisation'--(with a glance at Lord Vieuxbois),--'or in the destruction of property.' Lancelot said nothing, but thought the more. It did strike him at the moment that the few might, possibly, be made for the many, and not the many for the few; and that property was made for man, not man for property. But he contented himself with asking,-- 'You think, then, my lord, that in the present state of society, no dead-lift can be given to the condition--in plain English, the wages--of working men, without the destruction of property?' Lord Minchampstead smiled, and parried the question. 'There may be other dead-lift ameliorations, my young friend, besides a dead-lift of wages.' So Lancelot thought, also; but Lord Minchampstead would have been a little startled could he have seen Lancelot's notion of a dead-lift. Lord Minchampstead was thinking of cheap bread and sugar. Do you think that I will tell you of what Lancelot was thinking? But here Vieuxbois spurred in to break a last lance. He had been very much disgusted with the turn the conversation was taking, for he considered nothing more heterodox than the notion that the poor were to educate themselves. In his scheme, of course the clergy and the gentry were to educate the poor, who were to take down thankfully as much as it was thought proper to give them: and all beyond was 'self-will' and 'private judgment,' the fathers of Dissent and Chartism, Trades'-union strikes, and French Revolutions, et si qua alia. 'And pray, Mr. Smith, may I ask what limit you would put to education?' 'The capacities of each man,' said Lancelot. 'If man living in civilised society has one right which he can demand it is this, that the State which exists by his labour shall enable him to develop, or, at least, not hinder his developing, his whole faculties to their very utmost, however lofty that may be. While a man who might be an author remains a spade-drudge, or a journeyman while he has capacities for a master; while any man able to rise in life remains by social circumstances lower than he is willing to place himself, that man has a right to complain of the State's injustice and neglect.' 'Really, I do not see,' said Vieuxbois, 'why people should wish to rise in life. They had no such self-willed fancy in the good old times. The whole notion is a product of these modern days--'