Once more, then, the situation was this:  To him who could afford to earn nothing till he was two-and-twenty, and little till he was five-and-twenty, and could find the money for fees, lectures, and courses and coaches, everything that the country had to offer was open.  With this limitation there was never any country in which prizes were more open than Great Britain and Ireland.  A clever lad might enter the Royal Engineers or Artillery with a tolerable certainty of being a Colonel and a K.C.B. at fifty; or he might go into the Church where if he had ability and had cultivated eloquence and possessed good manners, he might count on a Bishopric; or he might go to the Bar, where, if he was lucky, he might become a judge or even Lord Chancellor.  Unless, however, he could provide the capital wanted for admission, he could attain to nothing—­nothing—­nothing.

What became, then, of the clever lad?  In some cases he became a clerk, crowding into a trade already overcrowded.  He trampled on his competitors, because most of them, the sons and grandsons of clerks, had no ambition and no perception of the things wanted.  This young fellow had.  He taught himself the things that were wanted; he generally took therefore the best place.  But he had to remain a clerk.

Or, more often, he became a teacher in a Board School.  In this capacity he obtained a certain amount of social consideration, a certain amount of independence, and an income varying From L150 to L400 a year.

Or, which also happened frequently, he might become a dissenting minister of the humbler kind.  In that case he had every chance of passing through life in a little chapel at a small town, a slave to his own, and to his congregation’s, narrow prejudices.

Or, he might go abroad, to one of the Colonies.  Earlier in the century, between the years 1850 and 1880, many poor lads had gone to Australia or New Zealand and had done well for themselves, a few had become millionaires; but by the year 1890 these Colonies, considered as likely places wherein it young man could advance himself, seemed played out.  Working-men they wanted, but not clever and penniless young fellows.

He might, it has been suggested, go into the House.  There were already one or two workingmen in the House.  But they were sent there especially to represent certain interests by working-men, not because their representative was an ambitious and clever young man.  And the working-man’s member, so far, had advanced a very little way as a political success.  It was not in Politics that a young man would find his opening.

This brings us to the one career open to him—­he might become a Journalist.  It is an attractive profession:  and even in its lower walks it seems a branch of literature.  There is independence of hours:  the pay depends upon the man’s power of work:  there are great openings in it and—­to the rising lad at least—­what seems a noble possibility in the shape of pay.