spare the fine edge of their faculties and the last few inches of
their chests without being any the less fit for their daily
routine. If I had adopted their habits, a startling deterioration
would have appeared in my writing before the end of a fortnight,
and frightened me back to what they would have considered an
impossible asceticism. But they paid no penalty of which they were
conscious. They had as much health as they wanted: that is, they
did not feel the need of a doctor. They enjoyed their smokes,
their meals, their respectable clothes, their affectionate games
with their children, their prospects of larger profits or higher
salaries, their Saturday half holidays and Sunday walks, and the
rest of it. They did less than two hours work a day and took from
seven to nine office hours to do it in. And they were no good for
any mortal purpose except to go on doing it. They were respectable
only by the standard they themselves had set. Considered seriously
as electors governing an empire through their votes, and choosing
and maintaining its religious and moral institutions by their
powers of social persecution, they were a black-coated army of
calamity. They were incapable of comprehending the industries they
were engaged in, the laws under which they lived, or the relation
of their country to other countries. They lived the lives of old
men contentedly. They were timidly conservative at the age at
which every healthy human being ought to be obstreperously
revolutionary. And their wives went through the routine of the
kitchen, nursery, and drawing-room just as they went through the
routine of the office. They had all, as they called it, settled
down, like balloons that had lost their lifting margin of gas; and
it was evident that the process of settling down would go on until
they settled into their graves. They read old-fashioned newspapers
with effort, and were just taking with avidity to a new sort of