The existence of this army of necessitous gentlewomen is a new thing in the land.  That is to say, there have always been ladies who have ’come down in the world’—­not a seaside lodging-housekeeper but has known better days.  There have always been girls who never expected to be poor; always suffered to live in a fool’s paradise who ought to have been taught some way of earning their livelihood.  Never till now, however, has this army of gentlewomen been so great, or its distress so acute.  One reason—­it is one which threatens to increase with accelerated rapidity—­is the depression of agriculture.  I think we hardly realize the magnitude of this great national disaster.  We believe that it is only the landlords, or the landlords and farmers, who are suffering.  If that were all—­but can one member of the body politic suffer and the rest go free from pain?  All the trade of the small towns droops with agriculture; the professional men of the country towns lose their practice; clergymen who depend upon glebe, dissenting ministers who depend upon the townspeople, lose their income; the labourers, the craftsmen—­why, it bewilders one even to think of the widespread ruin which will follow the agricultural depression if it continues.  And every day carriage becomes cheaper, and food products of all kinds are conveyed at lower prices and from greater distances.  Every fall in price makes it more difficult to let the farms, drives the rustics in greater numbers from the country to the town, lays the curse of labour upon thousands of untrained gentlewomen, and makes it more difficult for them to escape in the old way, that of marriage.

Another reason is the enormous increase during the last thirty years of the cultivated classes.  We have all, except the very lowest, moved upwards.  The working-man wears broadcloth and has his club; the tradesman who has grown rich also has his club, his daughters are young ladies of culture, his sons are educated at the public schools and the universities—­things perfectly proper and laudable.  The thickness of the cultured stratum grows greater every day.  But those who belong to the lower part of that stratum—­those whose position is not as yet strengthened by family connections and the accumulations of generations—­are apt to yield and to be crushed down by the first approach of misfortune.  Then the daughters who, in the last generation, would have joined the working girls and become dressmakers in a ‘genteel’ way, join the ranks of distressed gentlewomen.

Everybody knows the way up the social ladder.  It has been shown to those below by millions of twinkling feet.  It is a broad ladder up which people are always climbing, some slowly, some quickly—­from corduroy to broadcloth; from workshop to counter; from shop-boy to master; from shop to office; from trade to profession; from the bedroom over the shop to the great country villa.  The other day a bricklayer told me that his grandfather and the first Lord O.’s