We’re rich. Even the very poor in Britain are astoundingly rich by historical standards, some three thousand percent better off in food and housing and clothing and healthcare than the British poor two centuries ago. Economic historians can tell you.

Yes, I agree: the poor, even if much better off, are still poor by our elevated standards, and you and I want to raise them up. But schemes of redistribution, or the impossible goals of equality (What? Equality of height? Equality of intelligence? Of fast-twitch muscles?), don’t do it. The Liberal Lady Glencora Palliser (née M’Cluskie) in Anthony Trollope’s political novel Phineas Finn declares, “Making men and women all equal. That I take to be the gist of our political theory,” as against the Conservative delight in rank and privilege. But Joshua Monk, one of the novel’s radicals in the Cobden-Bright-Mill mould, sees the ethical point more clearly, and replies to her: “Equality is an ugly word, and frightens.” The motive of the true Liberal, Monk continues, should not be equality but “the wish of every honest [that is, honorable] man . . . to assist in lifting up those below him.”