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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
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