s best for England, and now his mind
turned covetously towards a country and a clime where his best promised
to yield richer and better fruit. He had mended society's nervous wrecks
so long that he had come to look upon the whole modern world as a
machine too hopelessly out of gear to repay his skilful efforts.

"People who never sit down to a meal with an appetite," he would say,
"people whose bodies are as surcharged as their houses with superfluous
loot, cannot hope to be well, physically or spiritually. We live on an
island huddled together, and yet we grow every day further apart. For
the acquisition of superfluous loot means incessant strife. The worst
sign of the times is that abstract terms no longer mean the same thing
to any two people. Individualism is thus destroying even the value of
language. Because where each man has his individual view a common
language itself becomes an impossibility. The effort of the Middle Ages
was to convert Europe into a single nation. The effort of the modern or
'Muddle' Age, is to convert each single nation into a Europe. That is
why abstract terms are slowly losing their value as the current coin of
speech."

St. Maur had attached himself to Lord Henry as a kind of voluntary or
honorary secretary. He assisted his master where and when he could, and
felt that he was more than adequately repaid in the enormous amount he
learnt from him.

"Is there no remedy?" he demanded seriously on a day early in August,
when the prospect of losing his friend was weighing more heavily than
usual upon him. The two were sitting talking in the study of Lord
Henry's cottage which stood in a lane off the London road, about two
miles north of Ashbury, where his sanatorium was situated.

"There is a remedy, of course," replied Lord Henry. "It would consist in
uniting modern nations afresh by means of a powerful common culture. It
is only then that men can be guided and led, for it is only then that
they can understand what they are taught about life and humanity. In the
Middle Ages a common culture was so universal, that even the barriers of
nationality did not prevent men from understanding one another. Now
there is such a total lack of a uniform culture that men of the same
nation speak an unknown tongue to one another. That is the recipe for
stupidity."

"But cannot this new uniform culture be created?" St. Maur insisted.

"It would mean a great new religion," Lord Henry answered. "And we are