a splendid club-room, the languid aristocrats, weary of the rolling hours, are making up their betting-books-they the choicest and most finished flowers of this planet, to whom the Derby is the event of the year. They are naturally highspirited young men, made for better things, but spoilt by their education and surroundings.

From the youth we pass to the mature specimens of the breed who are in possession of their estates and their titles. Lord Marney's peerage dates from the suppression of the monasteries, in which his ancestor had been a useful instru

ment.

The secretary of Henry VIII.'s vicar-general had been rewarded by the lands of a northern abbey. The property had grown in value with the progress of the country. The family for the three centuries of its existence had never produced a single person who had contributed any good thing to the service of the commonwealth. But their consequence had grown with their wealth, and the Lord Marney of 'Sybil' was aspiring to a dukedom. He is represented (being doubtless drawn from life) as the harshest of landlords, exacting the utmost penny of rent, leaving his peasantry to squalor and disease, or driving them off his estates to escape the burden of the poor-rate, and astonished to find Swing and his bonfires starting up about him as his natural reward. The second great peer of the story, Lord Mowbray, of a yet baser origin and character, owns the land on which has grown a mushroom city of mills and millhands. The ground-rents have made him fabulously rich, while, innocent of a suspicion that his wealth has brought obligations along with it, he lives in vulgar luxury in his adjoining castle.

On both estates the wretchedness is equal, though the

character of it is different. Lord Marney rules in a country district. A clergyman asks him how a peasant can rear his family on eight shillings a week. 'Oh, as for that,' said Lord Marney, 'I have generally found the higher the wages, the worse the workmen. They only spend their money in the beershops. They are the curse of the country.' The ruins of the monastery give an opportunity for a contrast between the old England and the new, by a picture of the time when the monks were the gentlest of landlords, when exactions and evictions were unknown, and when churches were raised to the service of God in the same spots where now rise the brick chimneys and factories as the spires and temples of the modern Mammon-worship.

In Mowbray, the town from which the earl of that name drew his revenue, the inhabitants were losing the elementary virtues of humanity. Factory-girls deserted their parents, and left them to starve, preferring an independence of vice and folly; mothers farmed out their children at threepence a week to be got rid of in a month or two by laudanum and treacle. Disraeli was startled to find that infanticide was practised as extensively and legally in England as it was on the banks of the Ganges.' It is the same to-day: occasional revelations lift the curtains, and show it active as ever; familiarity has led us to look upon it as inevitable; the question, what is to be done with the swarms of children multiplying in our towns, admitting, at present, of no moral solution.

With some elaboration, Disraeli describes the human creatures bred in such places which were growing up to take the place of the old English.

'Devilsdust'-so one of these children came to be called, for he had no legitimate name or parentage-having

survived a baby-farm by toughness of constitution, and the weekly threepence ceasing on his mother's death, was turned out into the streets to starve or to be run over.

Even this expedient failed. The youngest and feeblest of the band of victims, Juggernaut spared him to Moloch. All his companions were disposed of. Three months' play in the streets got rid of this tender company, shoeless, half-naked, and uncombed, whose ages varied from two to five years. Some were crushed, some were lost; some caught cold and fever, crept back to their garrets or their cellars, were dosed with Godfrey's Elixir, and died in peace. The nameless one, Devilsdust, would not disappear he always got out of the way of the carts and horses, and never lost his own. They gave him no food: he foraged for his own, and shared with the dogs the garbage of the streets. But still he lived stunted and pale, he defied even the fatal fever which was the only habitant of his cellar that never quitted it, and slumbering at night on a bed of mouldering straw, his only protection against the plashy surface of his den, with a dungheap at his head and a cesspool at his feet, he still clung to the only roof that sheltered him from the tempest. At length, when the nameless one had completed his fifth year, the pest which never quitted the nest of cellars of which he was a citizen raged in the quarter with such intensity that the extinction of its swarming population was menaced. The haunt of this child was peculiarly visited. All the children gradually sickened except himself and one night when he returned home he found the old woman herself dead and surrounded only by corpses. The child before this had slept on the same bed of straw with a corpse; but then there were also breathing things for his companions. A night passed only with corpses seemed to him itself a kind of death. He stole out of the cellar, quitted the quarter of pestilence, and, after much wandering, lay down near the door of a factory.

The child is taken in, not out of charity, but because an imp of such a kind happens to be wanted, and Devilsdust grows up, naturally enough, a Chartist and a dangerous

member of society. But was there ever a more horrible picture drawn? It is like a chapter of Isaiah in Cockney novelist dress. Such things, we are told, cannot happen now. Can they not? There was a recent revelation at Battersea not so unlike it. The East-end of London produces crimes which are not obliterated because they are forgotten; and rag bundles may be seen on frosty nights at London housedoors, which, if you unroll them, discover living things not so unlike poor Devilsdust. For the future, these waifs and strays are at least to be sent to school. The school will do something, especially if one full meal a day is added to the lessons; but what is the best of Board schools compared to the old apprenticeship? The apprentice had his three full meals a day, and decent clothes, and decent lodging, and was taught some trade or handicraft by which he could earn an honest living when his time was out. The school cannot reach the miserable home. The school teaches no useful occupation, and when school-time is over the child is again adrift upon the world. He is taught to read and write. His mind is opened. Yes. He is taught to read the newspapers, and the penny dreadfuls, and his wits are sharpened for him. Whether this will make him a more useful or more contented member of society, time will show.

Devilsdust was but one of many products of the manufacturing system which Disraeli saw and meditated upon.

He found a hand-loom weaver starving with his children in a garret, looking back upon the time when his loom had given him a cottage and a garden in his native village. The new machinery had ruined him, and he did not complain of the inevitable. But, as it was too late for him to learn another trade, he argued that if a society which had been.

created by labour suddenly became independent of it, that society was bound to maintain those whose only property was labour, out of the profits of that other property which had not ceased to be productive.

He talks with a superior artisan, who says to him:

'There is more serfdom in England now than at any time since the Conquest. I speak of what passes under my daily eyes when I say that those who labour can as little change or choose their masters now as when they were born thralls. There are great bodies of the working classes of this country nearer the condition of brutes than they have been at any time since the Conquest. Indeed, I see nothing to distinguish them from brutes, except that their morals are inferior. Incest and infanticide are as common among them as among the lower animals. The domestic principle wanes weaker and weaker every year in England nor can we wonder at it when there is no comfort to cheer and no sentiment to hallow the home.

...

'I am told a working man has now a pair of cotton stockings, and that Henry VIII. himself was not as well off. . . . I deny the premisses. I deny that the condition of the main body is better now than at any other period of our history—that it is as good as it has been at several. The people were better clothed, better lodged, and better fed just before the Wars of the Roses than they are at this moment. The Acts of Parliament, from the Plantagenets to the Tudors, teach us alike the prices of provisions and the rate of wages.'

'And are these the people?' the hero of the story asks himself, after such conversations. If so, I would I lived more among them. Compared with this converse, the tattle of our saloons has in it something humiliating. It is not merely that it is deficient in warmth and depth and breadth; that it is always discussing persons instead of principles; choking its want of thought in mimetic dogmas, and its want of feeling in superficial raillery. It is not merely that