three-quarters of their earnings in drink. The middle class spent
proportionately far less on liquor, and far more upon display of one
kind and another; they seldom denied themselves anything which they
could possibly obtain. The rich, as a class, lived in and for
indulgence, in some cases refined and subtle, in others gross; but
always indulgence. The sense of duty to the State simply did not exist
as an attribute of any class, but only here and there in individuals.

I believe I am strictly correct in saying that in half a century, while
the population increased by seventy-five per cent., lunacy had increased
by two hundred and fifty per cent.

Yet the majority rushed blindly on, paying no heed to any other thing on
earth than their own gratification, their own pursuit of the money for
the purchase of pleasure. One of the tragic fallacies of the period was
this crazy notion that not alone pleasure, but happiness, could be
bought with money, and in no other way. And the few who were stung by
the prevailing suffering and wretchedness into recognition of our
parlous state, we, for the most part, cherished my wild delusion, and
insisted that the trouble could be remedied if the State would contract
and discharge new obligations. We clamoured for more rights, more help,
more liberty, more freedom from this and that; never seeing that our
trouble was our incomplete comprehension of the rights and privileges
we had, with their corresponding obligations.

Though I knew them not, and as a _Daily Gazette_ reporter was little
likely to meet them, there were men who strove to open the eyes of the
people to the truth, and strove most valiantly. I call to mind a great
statesman and a great general, both old men, a great pro-consul, a great
poet and writer, a great editor, and here and there politicians with
elements of greatness in them, who fought hard for the right. But these
men were lonely figures as yet, and I am bound to say of the people's
leaders generally, at the time of my journalistic enterprise, that they
were a poor, truckling, uninspired lot of sheep, with a few clever
wolves among them, who saw the people's madness and folly and preyed
upon it masterfully by every trick within the scope of their ingenuity.

Even those who were honourable, disinterested, and, for such a period,
unselfish, were for the most part the disciples of tradition and the
slaves of that life-sapping curse of British politics: the party spirit