Granted that an expressive face, with interest in life stamped on it, is better than "chocolate box" or "barber's block" good looks, that agility and strength are better than symmetry without agility and strength; the trouble is that there is no interest stamped on so many of our faces, no agility or strength in so many of our limbs. If there were, those faces and limbs would pass my standard. The old Greek cult of the body was not to be despised. I defy even the most rigid Puritans to prove that a satisfactory moral condition can go on within an exterior which exhibits no signs of a live, able, and serene existence. By living on its nerves, overworking its body, starving its normal aspirations for fresh air, good food, sunlight, and a modicum of solitude, a country can get a great deal out of itself, a terrific lot of wealth, in three or four generations; but it is living on its capital, physically speaking. This is precisely what we show every sign of doing; and partly what I mean by "town-blight." II The impression I get, in our big towns, is most peculiar--considering that we are a free people. The faces and forms have a look of being possessed. To express my meaning exactly is difficult. There is a dulled and driven look, and yet a general expression of "Keep smiling--Are we down-hearted? No." It is as if people were all being forced along by a huge invisible hand at the back of their necks, whose pressure they resent yet are trying to make the best of, because they cannot tell whence it comes. To understand, you must watch the grip from its very beginnings. The small children who swarm in the little grey playground streets of our big towns pass their years in utter abandonment. They roll and play and chatter in conditions of amazing unrestraint and devil-may-care-dom in the midst of amazing dirt and ugliness. The younger they are, as a rule, the chubbier and prettier they are. Gradually you can see herd-life getting hold of them, the impact of ugly sights and sounds commonising the essential grace and individuality of their little features. On the lack of any standard or restraint, any real glimpse of Nature, any knowledge of a future worth striving for, or indeed of any future at all, they thrive forward into that hand-to-mouth mood from which they are mostly destined never to emerge. Quick and scattery as monkeys, and never alone, they become, at a rake's progress, little fragments of the herd. On poor food, poor air, and habits of least resistance, they wilt and grow distorted, acquiring withal the sort of pathetic hardihood which a Dartmoor pony will draw out of moor life in a frozen winter. All round them, by day, by night, stretches the huge, grey, grimy waste of streets, factory walls, chimneys, murky canals, chapels, public-houses, hoardings, posters, butchers' shops--a waste where nothing beautiful exists save a pretty cat or pigeon, a blue sky, perhaps, and a few trees and open spaces. The children of the class