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'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 trowsers, and were too prudish to make a shirt, or 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 civilization. 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,