‘This self-denying section has many names. Sometimes it is called the slave class; but “working,” or “lower” class, or “sons of toil,” is usually preferred, as being the politer and less descriptive term. They engage in all the mal-odorous tasks, to the end that the others may smell sweet, and accumulate porcelain, where the conception of beautiful living is in that somewhat rudimentary stage. Now you are in a curious, not to say an unexampled, position. You are without this indispensable class; and how you have got on, even so far, without it is a mystery to me. Being without it, you are, of course, without the other two. Your middle term of the great combination is nowhere; and, for your aristocracy, where is it to be found? You may have your own way of bettering yourselves, but what it is I fail to see.’
‘Of bettering ourselves by making others worse?’
‘Well—if you choose to put it in that way. Inequality is our religion, as a great man has so finely said. Our humblest grocer likes, in his way, to have an eldest son, and even sometimes, in modest imitation of his superiors, a youngest daughter.’
‘We can’t alter it,’ he said, fumbling in his pocket; ‘it ain’t allowed under the rules.’
‘A new law?’ I suggested—‘a sort of constitutional amendment?’
‘They wouldn’t stand it; that’s my humble belief.’
‘They might be made to stand it,’ I said darkly.
‘Who’s to make ’em?’ asked the Chief Magistrate.
‘Hum!’
But his Excellency said nothing to help me out.