being higher in one
division than another, things equalise themselves pretty much. I
believe it is much the same in the case of the other ancient
profession I have mentioned.

I have seen quite a large number of promising young men, fresh from
the Universities, and beginning life in London with high aspirations
and genuine patriotism in their hearts, only to become gradually
absorbed into the gigantic parasitical incubus of the body politic.
The process of absorption was none the less saddening and embittering
to watch, because its subjects usually waxed fatter and more
apparently jovial with each stage in their gradual exchange of ideals
for cash, patriotism for nepotism, enthusiasm for cynicism, and
disinterestedness for toadyism. Some had in them the makings of very
good and useful citizens. Their wives, so far as I was able to see,
almost invariably (whether deliberately or unknowingly) egged them on
in the downward path to complete surrender. As a rule, complete
surrender meant less striving and contriving, a better establishment,
and a freer use of hansom cabs in place of omnibuses. (I am thinking
for the moment of the days which knew not taxi-cabs.)

When they were writers, a frequent sign of the beginning of their end
(from my standpoint; of their success, from other standpoints,
including, no doubt, those of their wives) was that they began to
write of persons rather than principles; to eulogise rather than to
exhort, criticise, and suggest. So surely as they began their written
panegyrics of individuals, I found them laying aside the last remnants
of their private hero-worship. Very soon after this stage they
generally changed their clubs, becoming members of the most expensive
of these establishments; and from that point on, their progress
towards finished cynicism, fatty degeneration of the intellect, and
smiling abandonment of all scruples, all ideals, and all modesty, was
rapid and certain.

The inquiring student of such processes would perhaps have found
banquets, luncheons, and public dinners of a more or less political
colour his most prolific fields. Upon such occasions I always found
the genus very strongly represented. In one camp the dress clothes of
the followers would be of a better cut and more gracefully worn than
in the other camp; and those of the better-dressed camp had more of
assurance, more of brazen impudence, and more of hopelessly shallow
cynicism, I think, than those of other divis