s why we can always assure one another
over our wine that the rascal's misery is due to his habit of drinking.
We are down on him for it, because, if he could bear his life without
beer, we should save his beer-money--get him for lower wages. In short,
we should be richer and he soberer. Here is the yard; the arrangements
are indescribable. Seven of the inhabitants of that house had worked for
years in my father's mill. That is, they had created a considerable part
of the vast sums of money for drawing your attention to which you were
disgusted with me just now."

"Not at all," said Sir Charles faintly.

"You can see how their condition contrasts with that of my father's
horses. The seven men to whom I have alluded, with three hundred others,
were thrown destitute upon the streets by this." (Here he turned over a
leaf and displayed a photograph of an elaborate machine.) "It enabled my
father to dispense with their services, and to replace them by a handful
of women and children. He had bought the patent of the machine for fifty
pounds from the inventor, who was almost ruined by the expenses of his
ingenuity, and would have sacrificed anything for a handful of ready
money. Here is a portrait of my father in his masonic insignia. He
believed that freemasons generally get on in the world, and as the main
object of his life was to get on, he joined them, and wanted me to do
the same. But I object to pretended secret societies and hocus pocus,
and would not. You see what he was--a portly, pushing, egotistical
tradesman. Mark the successful man, the merchant prince with argosies
on every sea, the employer of thousands of hands, the munificent
contributor to public charities, the churchwarden, the member
of parliament, and the generous patron of his relatives his
self-approbation struggling with the instinctive sense of baseness
in the money-hunter, the ignorant and greedy filcher of the labor
of others, the seller of his own mind and manhood for luxuries and
delicacies that he was too lowlived to enjoy, and for the society of
people who made him feel his inferiority at every turn."

"And the man to whom you owe everything you possess," said Erskine
boldly.

"I possess very little. Everything he left me, except a few pictures, I
spent long ago, and even that was made by his slaves and not by him. My
wealth comes day by day fresh from the labor of the wretches who live in
the dens I have just shown you, or of a few aristocr