borrow the mantle of Mr. George Gissing or the force of Mr. Arthur
Morrison, and set myself in cold blood to measure the enormous defect
of myself and my fellows by the standards of a remote perfection, to
gauge the extent of this complex muddle of artificial and avoidable
shortcomings through which we struggle? Must one, indeed, pass in
review once more, bucolic stupidity, commercial cunning, urban
vulgarity, religious hypocrisy, political clap-trap, and all the raw
disorder of our incipient civilization before the point will be
conceded? What benefit is there in any such revision? rather it may
overwhelm us with the magnitude of what we seek to do. Let us not dwell
on it, on all the average civilized man still fails to achieve; admit
his imperfection, and for the rest let us keep steadfastly before us
that fair, alluring and reasonable conception of all that, even now,
the average man might be.

Yet one is tempted by the effective contrast to put against that clean
and beautiful child some vivid presentation of the average thing, to
sketch in a few simple lines the mean and graceless creature of our
modern life, his ill-made clothes, his clumsy, half-fearful, half-
brutal bearing, his coarse defective speech, his dreary unintelligent
work, his shabby, impossible, bathless, artless, comfortless home; one
is provoked to suggest him in some phase of typical activity, "enjoying
himself" on a Bank Holiday, or rejoicing, peacock feather in hand, hat
askew, and voice completely gone, on some occasion of public festivity
--on the defeat of a numerically inferior enemy for example, or the
decision of some great international issue at baseball or cricket.
This, one would say, we have made out of that, and so point the New
Republican question, "Cannot we do better?" But the thing has been done
so often without ever the breath of a remedy. Our business is with
remedies. We mean to do better, we live to do better, and with no more