Page:Yeast. A Problem - Kingsley (1851).djvu/98

'But why could you not charm all alike? Do not the poor want you as well as the rich?'

'What can I do for the poor, my good fellow? And what do they want? Have they not houses, work, a church, and schools,—and poor-rates to fall back on?'

The keeper smiled sadly,

'To fall back on, indeed! and down on, too. At all events, you rich might help to make Christians of them, and men of them. For I'm beginning to fancy strangely, in spite of all the preachers say, that, before ever you can make them Christians, you must make them men and women.'

'Are they not so already?'

'Oh, sir, go and see! How can a man be a man in those crowded styes, sleeping packed together like Irish pigs in a steamer, never out of the fear of want, never knowing any higher amusement than the beer-shop? Those old Greeks and Romans, as I read, were more like men than half our English labourers. Go and see! Ask that sweet heavenly angel, Miss Honoria,'—and the keeper again blushed,—'and she, too, will tell you. I think sometimes, if she had been born and bred like her father's tenants' daughters, to sleep where they sleep, and hear the talk they hear, and see the things they see, what would she have been now? We mustn't think of it.' And the keeper turned his head away and fairly burst into tears.

Lancelot was moved.