hundred years by drinking sour milk. Even these credulities
involved too severe an intellectual effort for many of them: it
was easier to grin and believe nothing. They maintained their
respect for themselves by "playing the game" (that is, doing what
everybody else did), and by being good judges of hats, ties, dogs,
pipes, cricket, gardens, flowers, and the like. They were capable
of discussing each other's solvency and respectability with some
shrewdness, and could carry out quite complicated systems of
paying visits and "knowing" one another. They felt a little vulgar
when they spent a day at Margate, and quite distinguished and
travelled when they spent it at Boulogne. They were, except as to
their clothes, "not particular": that is, they could put up with
ugly sights and sounds, unhealthy smells, and inconvenient houses,
with inhuman apathy and callousness. They had, as to adults, a
theory that human nature is so poor that it is useless to try to
make the world any better, whilst as to children they believed
that if they were only sufficiently lectured and whipped, they
could be brought to a state of moral perfection such as no fanatic
has ever ascribed to his deity. Though they were not intentionally
malicious, they practised the most appalling cruelties from mere
thoughtlessness, thinking nothing of imprisoning men and women for
periods up to twenty years for breaking into their houses; of
treating their children as wild beasts to be tamed by a system of
blows and imprisonment which they called education; and of keeping
pianos in their houses, not for musical purposes, but to torment
their daughters with a senseless stupidity that would have
revolted an inquisitor.

In short, dear reader, they were very like you and me. I could
fill a hundred pages with the tale of our imbecilities and still