for more; grant that he gets well through with A B C, and what follows; grant that he can read well enough to read the translations from French filth which his father is afraid of; but grant that his father and his mother, working with the blessing of his God, have kept him pure enough to steer clear of that temptation; grant that he becomes one-and-twenty, eager for algebra, for chemistry, for Latin, or for Greek.  What are you going to do about it then?  Then comes in the necessity which Mr. Maurice wanted to meet,—­and there comes in, by the same steps, the exceeding difficulty of his experiment.

It is the difficulty of caste.  I do not know how many castes there are in England; but I should think there were about thirty-seven.  Any member of either of these finds it as hard to associate with a member of any other as a Sudra does to associate with a Brahmin, or a Brahmin with a Sudra.  It is not that people are unwilling to condescend to the castes below them.  At least, it is not that chiefly.  It is, quite as much or more, that, with a good, solid, English pride, they do not care to be snobbish, and do not choose to put themselves upon people who are above them.  They “know their place,” they say.  And, for a race which has as good reason as the English for pride in its ability to stand firm, to “know one’s place” is a great thing to boast of.  People who have travelled on the Continent have been amused to see how zealously Sir John and Lady Jane and Miss Jeanette talked together at the table d’hote for a week, never by accident speaking to Mr. Williams, Mrs. Williams, and Miss Williamina, who sat next them.  This is not inability to condescend, however.  The Ws are as unwilling to speak to the Js.  This difficulty is the same difficulty which Mr. Litchfield describes in an account of his “Five Years’ Teaching at Working-Men’s College.”  “When a man first comes to our college,” he says, “he is apt to walk into his class-room in the solemn and discreet manner befitting an entry into a public institution, and generally for a night or two will persist in regarding his teacher as a severely official personage, whose dignity is not to be lightly trifled with.  Now nothing, I believe, can really be done, till this notion is extinguished,—­till teacher and students have got to understand each other, and have agreed to banish the foolish mauvaise honte which makes every Englishman shy of talking to a fellow-creature.  The freer the colloquial intercourse between teacher and students, the more is learned in the time.  To establish this is not easy; but harder still is the task of setting the students on a familiar footing with each other.  There seems to be some impassable obstacle to the fraternization of a dozen Londoners, though sitting side by side, week after week, doing the same work.”  The truth being, that the dozen Londoners might belong to twelve different castes.  And just as in “the Rifle Movement” the clerks in the Queen’s civil service could not serve in the same battalion with architects’ clerks on the one hand, or students at law on the other,—­you may have, in your algebra class, a goldsmith who is afraid of being snobbish if he speaks to a map-engraver, or a tailor who does not presume to address an opinion on Archimedes’ square to a piano-forte maker.