They would do better, thought Lady Victoria, to give it up, to abandon the struggle for intellectual superiority of that kind.

They have produced greater minds when, the mass of their countrymen were steeped in brutality, and Elizabethan surfeit of beef and ale, than they will ever produce with a twopenny-halfpenny universal education.

What is the use?
Progress.

What is progress?
Merely the adequate arrangement of inequalities--in the words of one of their own thinkers who knows most about it and troubles himself least about theories.

What is the use of your "universal" education, to which nine-tenths of the population submit as to a hopeless evil, which takes bread out of their mouths and puts bran into their heads; for might they not be at work in the fields instead of scratching pothooks on a slate?
At least so Lady Victoria thought.
"You look just like a sailor," said she to Claudius.
"I feel like one," he answered, "and I think I shall adopt the sea as a profession." "It is such a pity," said Miss Skeat, sternly clutching the twisted wire shroud.