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—’
He would have said more, but he luckily remembered at whose table he was sitting.
‘I think, honestly,’ said Lancelot, whose blood was up, ‘that we gentlemen all run into the same fallacy. We fancy ourselves the fixed and necessary element in society, to which all others are to accommodate themselves. “Given the rights of the few rich, to find the condition of the many poor.” It seems to me that other postulate is quite as fair: “Given the rights of the many poor, to find the condition of the few rich.”’
Lord Minchampstead laughed.
‘If you hit us so hard, Mr. Smith, I must really denounce you as a Communist. Lord Vieuxbois, shall we join the ladies?’
In the drawing-room, poor Lancelot, after rejecting overtures of fraternity from several young ladies, set himself steadily again against the wall to sulk and watch Argemone. But this time she spied in a few minutes his melancholy, moonstruck face, swam up to him, and said something kind and commonplace. She spoke in the simplicity of her heart, but he chose to think she was patronising him—she had not talked commonplaces to the vicar. He tried to say something smart and cutting,—stuttered, broke down, blushed, and shrank back again to the wall, fancying that every eye in the room was on him; and for one moment a flash of sheer hatred to Argemone swept through him.