which
all would lose their seats.
    It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of the spectacle of the
misery of the toilers at the rope was to enhance the passengers' sense of the
value of their seats upon the coach, and to cause them to hold on to them more
desperately than before. If the passengers could only have felt assured that
neither they nor their friends would ever fall from the top, it is probable
that, beyond contributing to the funds for liniments and bandages, they would
have troubled themselves extremely little about those who dragged the coach.
    I am well aware that this will appear to the men and women of the twentieth
century an incredible inhumanity, but there are two facts, both very curious,
which partly explain it. In the first place, it was firmly and sincerely
believed that there was no other way in which Society could get along, except
the many pulled at the rope and the few rode, and not only this, but that no
very radical improvement even was possible, either in the harness, the coach,
the roadway, or the distribution of the toil. It had always been as it was, and
it always would be so. It was a pity, but it could not be helped, and philosophy
forbade wasting compassion on what was beyond remedy.
    The other fact is yet more curious, consisting in a singular hallucination
which those on the top of the coach generally shared, that they were not exactly
like their brothers and sisters who pulled at the rope, but of finer clay, in
some way belonging to a higher order of beings who might justly expect to be
drawn. This seems unaccountable, but, as I once rode on this very coach and
shared that very hallucination, I ought to be believed. The strangest thing
about the hallucination was that those who had but just climbed up from the
ground, before they had outgrown the marks of the rope upon their hands, began
to fall under its influence. As for those whose parents and grand-parents before
them had been so fortunate as to keep their seats on the top, the conviction
they cherished of the essential difference between their sort of humanity and
the common article was absolute. The effect of such a delusion in moderating
fellow feeling for the sufferings of the mass of men into a distant and
philosophical compassion is obvious. To it I refer as the only extenuation I can
offer for the indifference which, at the period I write of, marked my own
attitude toward the misery of my brothers.
    In 1887 I came to my thirtieth year. Although still unmarried, I