“This is a photograph of a lace school.  It was a filthy room, twelve feet square.  It was paved with brick, and the children were not allowed to wear their boots, lest the lace should get muddy.  However, as there were twenty of them working there for fifteen hours a day—­all girls—­they did not suffer much from cold.  They were pretty tightly packed—­may be still, for aught I know.  They brought three or four shillings a week sometimes to their fond parents; and they were very quick-fingered little creatures, and stuck intensely to their work, as the overseer always hit them when they looked up or—­”

“Trefusis,” said Sir Charles, turning away from the table, “I beg your pardon, but I have no appetite for horrors.  You really must not ask me to go through your collection.  It is no doubt very interesting, but I can’t stand it.  Have you nothing pleasant to entertain me with?”

“Pooh! you are squeamish.  However, as you are a novice, let us put off the rest until you are seasoned.  The pictures are not all horrible.  Each book refers to a different country.  That one contains illustrations of modern civilization in Germany, for instance.  That one is France; that, British India.  Here you have the United States of America, home of liberty, theatre of manhood suffrage, kingless and lordless land of Protection, Republicanism, and the realized Radical Programme, where all the black chattel slaves were turned into wage-slaves (like my father’s white fellows) at a cost of 800,000 lives and wealth incalculable.  You and I are paupers in comparison with the great capitalists of that country, where the laborers fight for bones with the Chinamen, like dogs.  Some of these great men presented me with photographs of their yachts and palaces, not anticipating the use to which I would put them.  Here are some portraits that will not harrow your feelings.  This is my mother, a woman of good family, every inch a lady.  Here is a Lancashire lass, the daughter of a common pitman.  She has exactly the same physical characteristics as my well-born mother—­the same small head, delicate features, and so forth; they might be sisters.  This villainous-looking pair might be twin brothers, except that there is a trace of good humor about the one to the right.  The good-humored one is a bargee on the Lyvern Canal.  The other is one of the senior noblemen of the British Peerage.  They illustrate the fact that Nature, even when perverted by generations of famine fever, ignores the distinctions we set up between men.  This group of men and women, all tolerably intelligent and thoughtful looking, are so-called enemies of society—­Nihilists, Anarchists, Communards, members of the International, and so on.  These other poor devils, worried, stiff, strumous, awkward, vapid, and rather coarse, with here and there a passably pretty woman, are European kings, queens, grand-dukes, and the like.  Here are ship-captains, criminals, poets, men of science, peers, peasants, political economists, and representatives of dozens of degrees.  The object of the collection is to illustrate the natural inequality of man, and the failure of our artificial inequality to correspond with it.”