Hansards! Endless editors asking for more
copy! more copy! Alter to suit your own particular trade, and 'tis the
life of all of us.

The first generation after Stephenson and the Rocket pulled through with
it somehow. They inherited the sound constitutions of the men who sat on
rustic seats in the gardens of the twenties. The second
generation--that's you and me--felt the strain of it more severely: new
machines had come in to make life still more complicated: sixpenny
telegrams, Bell and Edison, submarine cables, evening papers,
perturbations pouring in from all sides incessantly; the suburbs
growing, the hubbub increasing, Metropolitan railways, trams, bicycles,
innumerable: but natheless we still endured, and presented the world all
the same with a third generation. That third generation--ah me! there
comes the pity of it! One fancies the impulse to marry and rear a family
has wholly died out of it. It seems to have died out most in the class
where the strain and stress are greatest. I don't think young men of
that class to-day have the same feelings towards women of their sort as
formerly. Nobody, I trust, will mistake me for a reactionary: in most
ways, the modern young man is a vast improvement on you and me at
twenty-five. But I believe there is really among young men in towns less
chivalry, less devotion, less romance than there used to be. That, I
take it, is the true reason why young men don't marry. With certain
classes and in certain places a primitive instinct of our race has
weakened. They say this weakening is accompanied in towns by an increase
in sundry hateful and degrading vices. I don't know if that is so; but
at least one would expect it. Any enfeeblement of the normal and natural
instinct of virility would show itself first in morbid aberrations. On
that I say nothing. I only say this--that I think the present crisis in
the English marriage market is due, not to clubs or the comfort of
bachelor quarters, but to the cumulative effect of nervous
over-excitement.

XV.

_EYE_ VERSUS _EAR_.

It is admitted on all hands by this time, I suppose, that the best way
of learning is by eye, not by ear. Therefore the authorities that
prescribe for us our education among all classes have decided that we
shall learn by ear, not by eye. Which is just what one might expect from
a vested interest.

Of course this superiority of sight over hearing is pre-eminently true
of natural science--that is to sa