how the higher class of manual labourers flourish; they are the salt of the earth, and I rejoice that they are no longer held down and regarded as in some way inferior to men who do nothing for two hundred pounds a year, except try to look as if they had two thousand pounds.  The quiet man who does the delicate work on the monster engines of a great ocean steamer is worthy of his hire, costly as his hire may be.  On his eye, his judgment of materials, his nerve, and his dexterity of hand depend precious lives.  For three thousand miles those vast masses of machinery must force a huge hull through huge seas; the mighty and shapely fabrics of metal must work with the ease of a child’s toy locomotive, and they must bear a strain that is never relaxed though all the most tremendous forces of Nature may threaten.  What a charge for a man!  His earnings could hardly be raised high enough if we consider the momentous nature of the duty he fulfils; he is an aristocrat of labour, and we do not know that there is not something grotesque in measuring and arguing over the money-payment made to him.  Then there are the specially skilled hands who in their monkish seclusion work at the instruments wherewith scientific wonders are wrought.  The rewards of their toil would have seemed fabulous to such men as Harrison the watchmaker; but they also form an aristocracy, and they win the aristocrat’s guerdon without practising his idleness.  The mathematician who makes the calculations for a machine is not so well paid as the man who finishes it; the observatory calculator who calculates the time of occulation for a planet cannot earn so much as the one who grinds a reflector.  In all our life the same tendency is to be seen:  the work of the hand outdoes in value the work of the brain.

XII.

THE HOPELESS POOR.

By fits and starts the public wake up and own with much clamour that there is a great deal of poverty in our midst.  While each new fit lasts the enthusiasm of good people is quite impressive in its intensity; all the old hackneyed signatures appear by scores in the newspapers, and “Pro Bono Publico,” “Audi Alteram Partem,” “X.Y.Z.,” “Paterfamilias,” “An Inquirer,” have their theories quite pat and ready.  Picturesque writers pile horror on horror, and strive, with the delightful emulation of their class, to outdo each other; far-fetched accounts of oppression, robbery, injustice, are framed, and the more drastic reformers invariably conclude that “Somebody” must be hanged.  We never find out which “Somebody” we should suspend from the dismal tree; but none the less the virtuous reformers go on claiming victims for the sacrifice, while, as each discoverer solemnly proclaims his bloodthirsty remedy, he looks round for applause, and seems to say, “Did you ever hear of stern and audacious statesmanship like mine?  Was there ever such a practical man?”