of the earth's
resources and of men's labour and thrift, and incidentally thereon of
human leisure and comfort and the world's sweetness.

Do you remember La Bruyere's famous description of the peasants under
Louis XIV.? "One occasionally meets with certain wild animals, both
male and female, scattered over the country; black, livid and parched
by the sun, bound to the soil which they scratch and dig up with
desperate obstinacy. They have something which sounds like speech, and
when they raise themselves up they show a human face. And, as a fact,
they are human beings." The _Ancien Regime_, which had reduced them to
that, and was to continue reducing them worse and worse for another
hundred years by every conceivable tax, tithe, toll, servage, and
privilege, did so mainly to pay for amusements. Amusements of the
_Roi-Soleil_, with his Versailles and Marly and aqueducts and
waterworks, plays and operas; amusements of Louis XV., with his
Parc-aux-Cerfs; amusements of Marie-Antoinette, playing the virtuous
rustic at Trianon; amusements of new buildings, new equipages, new
ribbons and bibbons, new diamonds (including the fatal necklace);
amusements of hunting and gambling and love-making; amusements
sometimes atrocious, sometimes merely futile, but all of them leaving
nothing behind, save the ravaged grass and stench of brimstone of
burnt-out fireworks.

Moreover, wasting money implies _getting more_. And the processes by
which such wasted money is replaced are, by the very nature of those
who do the wasting, rarely, nay, never, otherwise than wasteful in
themselves. To put into their pockets or, like Marshall Villeroi
("a-t-on mis de l'or dans mes poches?"), have it put by their valets,
to replace what was lost overnight, these proud and often honourable
nobles would ante-chamber and cringe for sinecures, pensions,
indemnities, privileges, importune and supplicate the King, the King's
mistress, pandar or lacquey. And the sinecure, pension, indemnity or
privilege was always deducted out of the bread--rye-bread,
straw-bread, grass-bread--which those parched, prone human animals
described by La Bruyere were extracting "with desperate
obstinacy"--out of the ever more sterile and more accursed furrow.

It is convenient to point the moral by reference to those kings and
nobles of other centuries, without incurring pursuit for libel, or
wounding the feelings of one's own kind and estimable contemporaries.
Still, it may be we