feel glad that the searchers after "genteel"
employment are now very much like the birds during a long frost. The
enormous lounging class who earn nothing do not offer an agreeable
subject for contemplation, and their parasites are horrible--there is
no other word. Yet we may gather a little consolation when we think
that the tendency is to raise the earnings of those who do something
or produce something. It is not good to know that a dustman makes more
money than hundreds of hard-worked and well-educated men, for this is
a grotesque state of things brought about by imbecile Government
officials. Neither do I quite like to know that a lady whose education
occupied nine years of her life is offered less wages than a good
housemaid. But I do assuredly like to hear 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 l