It is the Cad, vomited forth from every city and town in hundreds, thousands, millions, with every holy day and holy-day. The chief creation of modern life is the Cad; he is an exclusively modern manufacture, and it may safely be said that the poorest slave in Hellas, the meanest fellah in Egypt, the humblest pariah in Asia was a gentleman beside him. The Cad is the entire epitome, the complete blossom and fruit in one, of what we are told is an age of culture. Behold him in the vélodrome as he yells insanely after his kind as they tear along on their tandem machines in a match, and then ask yourself candidly, O my reader, if any age before this in all the centuries of earth ever produced any creature so utterly low and loathsome, so physically, mentally, individually, and collectively hideous? The helot of Greece, the gladiator of Rome, the swash-buckler of Mediæval Europe, nay, the mere pimp and pander of Elizabethan England, of the France of the Valois, of the Spain of Velasquez, were dignity, purity, courage in person beside the Cad of this breaking dawn of the twentieth century; the Cad rushing on with his shrill scream of laughter as he knocks down the feeble woman or the yearling child, and making life and death and all eternity seem ridiculous by the mere existence of his own intolerable fatuity and bestiality. XI THE QUALITY OF MERCY Whatever we may think of the artistic and critical influence of Mr Ruskin on his age, we cannot but view with admiration and reverence much of his moral teaching, and there are in his writings innumerable isolated words of wisdom which would be well printed in letters of gold wherever men and women congregate and youth is educated. Amongst these is one which could not be too often reproduced before the eyes of an indifferent, egotistic, and cynical generation. It is this: 'Whosoever is not actively kind, is cruel.' It is an absolute truth, but one which is very little heeded. I will not here speak of the three crystallised and applauded forms of cruelty, war, sport, and scientific experiment. I wish to speak only of what is by scientists termed 'lay' cruelty, but which I would myself call general and scarcely conscious cruelty--the ill-treatment of all sentient creatures not human, by human creatures, due to the apathy, egotism, and unkindness of the latter. It is to this form of cruelty that Mr Ruskin alludes in the sentence previously quoted.