understander to sympathize. It is hard entirely to
share another people's life, to give oneself up to it, to be received
into it. They know intuitively (their intuitions are extraordinarily
acute) that one is thinking more than one gives voice to; putting two
and two together; which keeps alive a lingering involuntary distrust
and a certain amount, however little, of ill-grounded respectfulness.
(Respectfulness is less a tribute to real or fancied superiority, than
an armour to defend the poor man's private life.) Besides which, these
people are necessary to, or at least their intimacy is greatly desired
by, myself, whereas their own life is complete and rounded without me.
I am tangential merely. They owe me nothing; I owe them much. It is I
who am the client, they the patrons.

[Sidenote: _CLASS DISTINCTIONS_]

We are told often enough nowadays that capital fattens on labour,
naturally, instinctively, without much sense of wrong-doing, and has
so fattened since the days when Laban tried to overreach Jacob. What
we are not so often told is that the poor man not less instinctively
looks upon the gen'leman as legitimate sport. 'An 'orrible lie'
between two poor people is fair play from a poor man to a wealthier,
just as, for instance, the wealthy man considers himself at liberty to
make speeches full of hypocritical untruth when he is seeking the
suffrage of the free and independent electors or is trying to teach
the poor man how to make himself more profitable to his employer. It
is stupid, at present, to ignore the existence of class distinctions;
though they do not perhaps operate over so large a segment of life as
formerly, they still exist in ancient strength, notwithstanding the
fashionable cant--lip-service only to democratic ideals--about the
whole world kin. There is not one high wall, but two high walls
between the classes and the masses, so-called, and that erected in
self-defence by the exploited is the higher and more difficult to
climb. On the one side is a disciplined, fortified Gibraltar, held by
the gentry; then comes a singularly barren and unstable neutral zone;
and on the other side is the vast chaotic mass. In Under Town, I
notice, a gentleman is always _gen'leman_, a workman or tramp is
_man_, but the fringers, the inhabitants of the neutral zone, are
called _persons_. For example: "That _man_ what used to work for the
council is driving about the _gen'leman_ as stays with Mrs Smith--the
_person_