as men, and were cheaper and more docile, he turned away about seventy out of every hundred of his hands (so he called the men), and replaced them by their wives and children, who made money for him faster than ever.  By this time he had long ago given up managing the factories, and paid clever fellows who had no money of their own a few hundreds a year to do it for him.  He also purchased shares in other concerns conducted on the same principle; pocketed dividends made in countries which he had never visited by men whom he had never seen; bought a seat in Parliament from a poor and corrupt constituency, and helped to preserve the laws by which he had thriven.  Afterwards, when his wealth grew famous, he had less need to bribe; for modern men worship the rich as gods, and will elect a man as one of their rulers for no other reason than that he is a millionaire.  He aped gentility, lived in a palace at Kensington, and bought a part of Scotland to make a deer forest of.  It is easy enough to make a deer forest, as trees are not necessary there.  You simply drive off the peasants, destroy their houses, and make a desert of the land.  However, my father did not shoot much himself; he generally let the forest out by the season to those who did.  He purchased a wife of gentle blood too, with the unsatisfactory result now before you.  That is how Jesse Trefusis, a poor Manchester bagman, contrived to be come a plutocrat and gentleman of landed estate.  And also how I, who never did a stroke of work in my life, am overburdened with wealth; whilst the children of the men who made that wealth are slaving as their fathers slaved, or starving, or in the workhouse, or on the streets, or the deuce knows where.  What do you think of that, my love?”

“What is the use of worrying about it, Sidney?  It cannot be helped now.  Besides, if your father saved money, and the others were improvident, he deserved to make a fortune.”

“Granted; but he didn’t make a fortune.  He took a fortune that others made.  At Cambridge they taught me that his profits were the reward of abstinence—­the abstinence which enabled him to save.  That quieted my conscience until I began to wonder why one man should make another pay him for exercising one of the virtues.  Then came the question:  what did my father abstain from?  The workmen abstained from meat, drink, fresh air, good clothes, decent lodging, holidays, money, the society of their families, and pretty nearly everything that makes life worth living, which was perhaps the reason why they usually died twenty years or so sooner than people in our circumstances.  Yet no one rewarded them for their abstinence.  The reward came to my father, who abstained from none of these things, but indulged in them all to his heart’s content.  Besides, if the money was the reward of abstinence, it seemed logical to infer that he must abstain ten times as much when he had fifty thousand a year as when he had only five thousand.  Here was a problem