Ah, believe me, an aristocracy is a feudal fortress which, though it has merciless beleaguers in the Jacquerie of plebeian Envy, has yet no foe so deadly as its own internal traitor of Lost Dignity!
"But ye dunna get good wage?" said the miner, with practical wisdom.
"We doan't," confessed the East Anglian, "we doan't. And that theer botherin' machinery as do the threshin', and the reapin', and the sawin', and the mowin', hev a ruined us. See!—in old time, when ground was frost-bit or water-soaked, the min threshed in-doors, in barns, and kep in work so. But now the machine, he dew all theer is to dew, and dew it up so quick. Theer's a many more min than theer be things to dew. In winter-time measter he doan't want half o' us; and we're just out o' labour; and we fall sick, cos o' naethin' to eat; and goes tew parish—able-bodied min strong as steers."
"Machine's o' use i' mill-work," suggested one of the northerners.
"O' use! ay, o' coorse 'tis o' use—tew tha measters," growled the East Anglian. "But if ye warn't needed at yer mill cos the iron beast was a weavin' and a reelin' and a dewin' of it all, how'd yer feel? Wi' six children, mebbe, biggest ony seven or eight, a crazin' ye for bread. And ye mayn't send 'em out, cos o' labour-laws, to pick up a halfpenny for theerselves; and tha passon be all agin yer, cos ye warn't thrifty and didn't gev a penny for the forrin blacks out o' the six shillin' a week? Would yer think iron beast wor o' use thin? or would yer damn him hard?"
The poetic faculty—as you call the insight and the sympathy which feels a divinity in all created things and a joy unutterable in the natural beauty of the earth—is lacking in the generality of women, notwithstanding their claims to the monopoly of emotion. If it be not, how comes it that women have given you no great poet since the days of Sappho?
It is women's deficiency in intellect, you will observe. Not a whit: it is women's deficiency in sympathy.
The greatness of a poet lies in the universality of his sympathies. And women are not sympathetic, because they are intensely self-centred.