e the commonest form of
obsession, and one that develops soonest. Nine out of ten
children--particularly present-day children, whose doting parents
encourage their every desire--are fonder of cramming their bellies than
of playing cricket or skipping; games soon weary them, but buns and
chocolates never. The truth is, buns and chocolate have obsessed them.
They think of them all day, and dream of them all night. It is buns and
chocolates! wherever and whenever they turn or look--buns and
chocolates! This greed soon develops, as the occult brain intended it
should; enforced physical labour, or athletics, or even sedentary work
may dwarf its growth for a time, but at middle and old age it comes on
again, and the buns and chocolates are become so many coursed luncheons
and dinners. Their world is one of menus, nothing but menus; their only
mental exertion the study of menus, and I have no doubt that "tuck"
shops and restaurants are besieged by the ever-hungry spirit of the
earth-bound glutton. Though the drink-germ is usually developed later
(and its later growth is invariably accelerated with seas of alcohol),
it not infrequently feeds its initial growth with copious streams of
ginger beer and lemon kali.

Manual labourers--_i.e._ navvies, coal-heavers, miners, etc.--are
naturally more or less brutal. Their brain-cells at birth offered so
little resistance to the evil occult influences that they received, in
full, all the lower germs of thought inoculated by the occult brains.
Drink, gluttony, cruelty, all came to their infant cerebrums
cotemporaneously. The cruelty germ develops first, and cats, dogs,
donkeys, smaller brothers, and even babies are made to feel the superior
physical strength of the early wearer of hobnails. He is obsessed with a
mania for hurting something, and with his strongly innate instinct of
self-preservation, invariably chooses something that cannot harm him.
Daily he looks around for fresh victims, and finally decides that the
weedy offspring of the hated superior classes are the easiest prey. In
company with others of his species, he annihilates the boy in Etons on
his way to and from school, and the after recollections of the
weakling's bloody nose and teardrops are as nectar to him. The cruelty
germ develops apace. The bloody noses of the well-dressed classes are
his mania now. He sees them at every turn and even dreams of them. He
grows to manhood, and either digs in the road or plies the pick