ngland. All classes are forgetting their
discipline, and, without fitting themselves for what they aspire to,
they are trying to snatch from some other class. And the whole thing is
rotten with mawkish sentimentality, and false prudery, and abeyance of
common sense."

"Yes," said Lady Ethelrida, much interested.

"Lycurgus went to the root of things," the financier continued, "and
made the people morally and physically healthy, and ruthlessly expunged
the unfit--not like our modern nonsense, which encourages science to
keep, among the prospective parents for the future generation, all the
most diseased. Moral and physical balance and proportion were the ideas
of the Spartans. They would not have even been allowed to compete in the
games, if they were misshapen. And the analogy is, no one unfitted for a
part ought to aspire to it, for the public good. Any one has a right to
scream, if he does not obtain it when he is fitted for it."

"Yes, I see," said Lady Ethelrida. "Then what do you mean when you say
every class is trying to snatch something from some other class? Do you
mean from the class above it? Or what? Because unless we, for
instance--technically speaking--snatched from the King from whom could
we snatch?"

The financier smiled.

"I said purposely, 'some other class,' instead of 'some class above it,'
for this reason: it is because a certain and ever-increasing number of
your class, if I may say so, are snatching--not, indeed, from the
King--but from all classes _beneath them_, manners and morals, and
absence of tenue, and absence of pride--things for which their class was
not fitted. They had their own vices formerly, which only hurt each
individual and not the order, as a stain will spoil the look of a bit of
machinery but will not upset its working powers like a piece of grit.
What they put into the machine now is grit. And the middle classes are
snatching what they think is gentility, and ridiculous pretenses to
birth and breeding; and the lower classes are snatching everything they
can get from the pitiful fall of the other two, and shouting that all
men are equal, when, if you come down to the practical thing, the
foreman of some ironworks, say--where the opinions were purely
socialistic, in the abstract--would give the last joined stoker a sound
trouncing for aspirations in his actual work above his capabilities;
because he would know that if the stoker were then made foreman the
machinery could no