t endure to think that one man
should be considered to be worthier than another because he was
richer. He would admit the riches, and even the justice of the
riches,--having been himself, during much of his life, a rich man in
his own sphere; but would deny the worthiness; and would adduce, in
proof of his creed, the unworthiness of certain exalted sinners. The
career of the Earl Lovel had been to him a sure proof of the baseness
of English aristocracy generally. He had dreams of a republic in
which a tailor might be president or senator, or something almost
noble. But no rational scheme of governance among mankind had ever
entered his mind, and of pure politics he knew no more than the
journeyman who sat stitching upon his board.

But Daniel Thwaite was a thoughtful man who had read many books.
More's Utopia and Harrington's Oceana, with many a tale written
in the same spirit, had taught him to believe that a perfect form
of government, or rather of policy, under which all men might be
happy and satisfied, was practicable upon earth, and was to be
achieved,--not merely by the slow amelioration of mankind under
God's fostering ordinances,--but by the continued efforts of good and
wise men who, by their goodness and wisdom, should be able to make
the multitude believe in them. To diminish the distances, not only
between the rich and the poor, but between the high and the low, was
the grand political theory upon which his mind was always running.
His father was ever thinking of himself and of Earl Lovel; while
Daniel Thwaite was considering the injustice of the difference
between ten thousand aristocrats and thirty million of people, who
were for the most part ignorant and hungry. But it was not that he
also had not thoughts of himself. Gradually he had come to learn that
he need not have been a tailor's foreman in Wigmore Street had not
his father spent on behalf of the Countess Lovel the means by which
he, the son, might already have become a master tradesman. And yet
he had never begrudged it. He had been as keen as his father in the
cause. It had been the romance of his life, since his life had been
capable of romance;--but with him it had been no respect for the
rank to which his father was so anxious to restore the Countess,
no value which he attached to the names claimed by the mother and
the daughter. He hated the countess-ship of the Countess, and
the ladyship of the Lady Anna. He would fain that they should
ha