‘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.
‘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.’