s; especially of the
spectacle of youth. This is what the old Universities in their noblest
aspect really are; and this is why there is always something to be said
for keeping them as they are. Aristocracy is not a tyranny; it is not
even merely a spell. It is a vision. It is a deliberate indulgence in a
certain picture of pleasure painted for the purpose; every Duchess is
(in an innocent sense) painted, like Gainsborough's "Duchess of
Devonshire." She is only beautiful because, at the back of all, the
English people wanted her to be beautiful. In the same way, the lads at
Oxford and Cambridge are only larking because England, in the depths of
its solemn soul, really wishes them to lark. All this is very human and
pardonable, and would be even harmless if there were no such things in
the world as danger and honour and intellectual responsibility. But if
aristocracy is a vision, it is perhaps the most unpractical of all
visions. It is not a working way of doing things to put all your
happiest people on a lighted platform and stare only at them. It is not
a working way of managing education to be entirely content with the mere
fact that you have (to a degree unexampled in the world) given the
luckiest boys the jolliest time. It would be easy enough, like the
writer in the _Outlook_, to enjoy the pleasures and deny the perils. Oh
what a happy place England would be to live in if only one did not love
it!

WOMAN

A correspondent has written me an able and interesting letter in the
matter of some allusions of mine to the subject of communal kitchens. He
defends communal kitchens very lucidly from the standpoint of the
calculating collectivist; but, like many of his school, he cannot
apparently grasp that there is another test of the whole matter, with
which such calculation has nothing at all to do. He knows it would be
cheaper if a number of us ate at the same time, so as to use the same
table. So it would. It would also be cheaper if a number of us slept at
different times, so as to use the same pair of trousers. But the
question is not how cheap are we buying a thing, but what are we buying?
It is cheap to own a slave. And it is cheaper still to be a slave.

My correspondent also says that the habit of dining out in restaurants,
etc., is growing. So, I believe, is the habit of committing suicide. I
do not desire to connect the two facts together. It seems fairly clear
that a man could not dine at a restaurant b