"By whom?"
"By Edwards. And the rest of the hands were in mortal fear of him; utterly cowed. They dared not move without his pleasure."
"Abuses," papa muttered; - "nothing to do with the system."
"What must the system be where such things are possible? where one such thing is possible? And oh, papa, they suffer! there is no such thing as real comfort of life; there is no scope or liberty for the smallest upward tendency. Nothing is their own, not their own time; they have no chance to be anything but inferior."
"They have all the essentials of comfortable living, and they are comfortable," said my father.
"Papa, they do not think so."
"Few people do think so," said papa. "It is a vice of humanity."
I was silent a little bit, and then I ventured to say, -
"Papa, the Lord Jesus loved them well enough to die for them."
"Well," said papa, rather growlingly, "what then?"