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trophes, and the like, than we do now.

However, that is not our affair.

We are

here to work on our own account, not to judge of others."

"It is an old saying, Joshua, but a true one, 'extremes meet,'" said I. "The very poor have no taste for refined pleasure, and indeed no power of indulging it if they had; and the very rich, sated with all that is given to them by their position, devise new excitements of an ignoble kind. I suppose that is something like it?"

"I suppose so," he answered. "At all events, there can be no such thing as levelling down. It would be no righteousness to bring the rich, the refined, the well educated down to the level of the poor; but to raise up the masses, and to impose on the upper classes positive duties, this is the only way

in which the difference between high and low can be lessened. And if this can be done free of national revolt and bloodshed, it will be a godlike work, and the blessed solution of the greatest difficulty the world has seen yet. It cannot be a good thing that some men have to work till all the strength of intellect is worked out of them, while others are lapped in such idleness that all theirs is either bemused and stagnated, or turned to evil issues for want of being wholesomely used. Come how it Come how it may, it

has to come-this more equal distribution of the better things of life. I do not mean that the duchess will have to share her velvet cushions with the seamstress; but it has to be that, either by education or improved machinery, or both, there will not be the enormous difference there is now between the

duchess and the seamstress.

We have made

a great parade lately of our sympathy with the North, on the ground of emancipation; but Society here in London holds slaves as arbitrarily and as cruelly as ever the Southern planters did; and its vested interests, however demoralising, are as sacred to us as were the vested interests of the planter to him. I will never again try a fraternal union with a rich house. When the workingmen have their political and social rights, and have utilised their leisure to refine and elevate, to beautify and adorn their lives, then, when we are radically equal, we can meet as men and brothers. As we are now, we are experiments to some, mere temporary amusements to others, inferiors to all; and we pin our faith to a strawhang our golden hopes on gossamer

when we look for vital co-operation from

them."

"I thought Joshua would find her out in time," was Mary's comment. "I took stock of her from the first, and saw she was no good."

CHAPTER XI.

I HAVE said so much of the personal charities of Joshua that I seem to have thrown into the shade, by comparison, his political life and action; and yet this was the more important of the two. The extreme section of republican working men, though they did not go in for his religious views, made use of his political zeal; and when work was bad to get, sometimes he was sent as a delegate, sometimes he went of his own accord, to the various towns that needed either encouragement or awakening; where he gave lectures on the necessity of labour

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