be poor; always suffered to live in a fool's paradise who ought to
have been taught some way of earning their livelihood. Never till now,
however, has this army of gentlewomen been so great, or its distress
so acute. One reason--it is one which threatens to increase with
accelerated rapidity--is the depression of agriculture. I think we
hardly realize the magnitude of this great national disaster. We
believe that it is only the landlords, or the landlords and farmers,
who are suffering. If that were all--but can one member of the body
politic suffer and the rest go free from pain? All the trade of the
small towns droops with agriculture; the professional men of the
country towns lose their practice; clergymen who depend upon glebe,
dissenting ministers who depend upon the townspeople, lose their
income; the labourers, the craftsmen--why, it bewilders one even to
think of the widespread ruin which will follow the agricultural
depression if it continues. And every day carriage becomes cheaper,
and food products of all kinds are conveyed at lower prices and from
greater distances. Every fall in price makes it more difficult to let
the farms, drives the rustics in greater numbers from the country to
the town, lays the curse of labour upon thousands of untrained
gentlewomen, and makes it more difficult for them to escape in the old
way, that of marriage.

Another reason is the enormous increase during the last thirty years
of the cultivated classes. We have all, except the very lowest, moved
upwards. The working-man wears broadcloth and has his club; the
tradesman who has grown rich also has his club, his daughters are
young ladies of culture, his sons are educated at the public schools
and the universities--things perfectly proper and laudable. The
thickness of the cultured stratum grows greater every day. But those
who belong to the lower part of that stratum--those whose position is
not as yet strengthened by family connections and the accumulations of
generations--are apt to yield and to be crushed down by the first
approach of misfortune. Then the daughters who, in the last
generation, would have joined the working girls and become dressmakers
in a 'genteel' way, join the ranks of distressed gentlewomen.

Everybody knows the way up the social ladder. It has been shown to
those below by millions of twinkling feet. It is a broad ladder up
which people are always climbing, some slowly, some quickly--from
corduroy to broa