but stinted and ignorant
toil will rise against its oppression, and innocence and guilt will
alike suffer from its fury. Have you never known such an occurrence?"

"Not in my day or country," I answered "But the city in which I was
educated has such a history. Its gutters flowed with human blood, the
blood of its nobles."

She inclined her head significantly. "It will be repeated," she said
sadly, "unless you educate them. Give their bright and active minds the
power of knowledge. They will use it wisely, for their own and their
country's welfare."

I doubted my ability to do this, to contend against rooted and inherited
prejudice, but I resolved to try. I did not need to be told that the
rich and powerful had a monopoly of intellect: Nature was not partial to
them, for the children of the poor, I well knew, were often handsomer
and more intellectual than the offspring of wealth and aristocratic
birth.

I have before spoken of the positions occupied by those who performed
what I had been bred to regard as menial work. At first, the mere fact
of the person who presided over the kitchen being presented to me as an
equal, was outraging to all my hereditary dignity and pride of birth. No
one could be more pronounced in a consciousness of inherited nobility
than I. I had been taught from infancy to regard myself as a superior
being, merely because the accident of birth had made me so, and the
arrogance with which I had treated some of my less favored schoolmates
reverted to me with mortifying regret, when, having asked Wauna to point
out to me the nobly born, she looked at me with her sweet expression of
candor and innocence and said:

"We have no nobility of birth. As I once before told you, intellect is
our only standard of excellence. It alone occupies an exalted place and
receives the homage of our people."

In a subsequent conversation with her mother, the Preceptress, she said:

"In remote ages, great honor and deference was paid to all who were
born of rulers, and the designation 'noble blood,' was applied to them.
At one time in the history of our country they could commit any outrage
upon society or morals without fear of punishment, simply because they
belonged to the aristocracy. Even a heinous murder would be unnoticed if
perpetrated by one of them. Nature alone did not favor them Imbecile and
immoral minds fell to the lot of the aristocrat as often as to the lowly
born. Nature's laws are inflexible and