al
training outside games, and that even of the most perfunctory character,
the majority qualifying as interested spectators merely, of the prowess
of the minority. But it certainly is remarkable, that no practical
business training, nor studies of a sort calculated to be of use in
later business training, should have been given in the schools most
favoured by those for whom business was a life's calling. In this, as in
so many other matters, I suppose we were guided and directed entirely by
habit and tradition; the line of least resistance.

When I talked of my prospects with handsome Leslie Wheeler--his was his
father's face, unblemished and unworn--our conversation was always three
parts jocular, at all events upon his side. I was to recast society and
mould our social system anew by means of my pen, and of journalism. I
was to provide "the poor blessed poor" with hot-buttered rolls and
devilled kidneys for breakfast, said Leslie, and introduce old-age
pensions for every British workman who survived his twenty-first
birthday.

I would not be understood to suggest that this sort of facetiousness
indicated the average attitude of the period with regard to the horrible
fact that the country contained millions of people permanently in a
state of want and privation. But it was a quite possible attitude then.
Such people as my friend could never have mocked the sufferings of an
individual. But with regard to the state of affairs, the pitiful
millions, as an abstract proposition, indifference was the rule, a tone
of light cynicism was customary, and "the poor we have always with us,"
quoted with a deprecatory shrug, was an accepted conversational refuge,
even among such people as the clergy and charitable workers.

And this, if one comes to think of it, was inevitable. The life and
habits and general attitude of the period would have been absolutely
impossible, in conjunction with any serious face-to-face consideration
of a situation which embraced, for example, such preposterously
contradictory elements as these:

The existence of huge and growing armies of absolutely unemployed men;
the insistence of the populace, and particularly the business people,
upon the disbandment of regiments, and upon great naval and military
reductions, involving further unemployment; the voting of considerable
sums for distribution among the unemployed; violent opposition to the
mere suggestion of State aid to enable the unemployed of Engl