that there must always be rich and poor, and that a condition of material
equality was impossible. It used to be commonly said, and it often seemed
true, that the social reformer who tried to better the condition of the
people found a more discouraging obstacle in the hopelessness of the
masses he would raise than in the active resistance of the few, whose
superiority was threatened. And indeed, Edith, to be fair to my own
class, I am bound to say that with the best of the rich it was often as
much this same hopelessness as deliberate selfishness that made them what
we used to call conservative. So you see, it would have done no good even
if I had gone to preaching as you fancied. The poor would have regarded
my talk about the possibility of an equality of wealth as a fairy tale,
not worth a laboring man's time to listen to. Of the rich, the baser sort
would have mocked and the better sort would have sighed, but none would
have given ear seriously."

But Edith smiled serenely.

"It seems very audacious for me to try to correct your impressions of
your own contemporaries and of what they might be expected to think and
do, but you see the peculiar circumstances give me a rather unfair
advantage. Your knowledge of your times necessarily stops short with
1887, when you became oblivious of the course of events. I, on the other
hand, having gone to school in the twentieth century, and been obliged,
much against my will, to study nineteenth-century history, naturally know
what happened after the date at which your knowledge ceased. I know,
impossible as it may seem to you, that you had scarcely fallen into that
long sleep before the American people began to be deeply and widely
stirred with aspirations for an equal order such as we enjoy, and that
very soon the political movement arose which, after various mutations,
resulted early in the twentieth century in overthrowing the old system