tasted such good soup in all their born days.

It may truthfully be said that the Queen never spent an idle day, and
never came to the end of one without the consciousness of having done
good. All the more, therefore, is it remarkable that, as the outcome of
so much benevolence and charity, the Queen knew absolutely nothing of
the real needs and conditions of the people, and that she knew still
less how any alterations in the laws, manners, or customs of the country
could better or worsen the conditions of unemployment, sweated labor, or
public morality. Her whole idea of political economy was summed up in
the proposition that anything must be good for the country which was
good for trade; and it may certainly be said that for the majority of
trade interests she was as good as gold. Without caring too much for
dress (being herself wholly devoid of personal vanity) she ordered
dresses in abundance, and constantly varied the fashion, the color, and
the material, because she was given to understand that change and
variety stimulated trade. Her most revolutionary act had been to
readopt, one fine spring morning, the ample skirt of the crinoline
period in order to counteract the distress and shortage of work caused
in the textile trade by the introduction and persistence of the "hobble
skirt." As a consequence of this sudden disturbance of the evolutionary
law governing creation in the modiste's sense of the word, there was a
sharp reaction a year later, which--after the artificial stimulus of the
previous season--threw more women out of employment than ever; new
fancy-trades had to be learned in apprenticeships at starvation
wages--with the result that wages had to be eked out in other ways. But
of all this her Majesty heard nothing. It never occurred to anybody that
these ultimate consequences of her amiable incentive to industry could
possibly concern her; and the Queen, finding that people no longer knew
how to adapt themselves to the long, full skirts of their grandmothers,