That is about where we stand as a nation. Of course, a few fortunates mailed in a happy, indefeasible genius of wonder and delight at everything round them are all right. And so are a few clods of whole-hog insensibility. Most of us, on the whole, find that effort is less fun than it was, and many things somewhat dull that used to sparkle with interest; the salt has lost, not all, but some of its savour; the grasshopper is a bit of a burden; old hobbies of politics, social causes, liberal comradeships, the loves and wars of letters and art, which used to excite, look at times as if they might only have been, at the best, rather a much ado about nothing; buzzing about our heads there come importunate suspicions that much of what we used to do so keenly was hardly worth doing, and that the dim, far goals we used to struggle towards were only possibly worth trying for and are, anyhow, out of reach now. That is the somewhat sick spirit's condition. The limp apathy that we see at elections, the curious indifference in presence of public wrongs and horrors, the epidemic of sneaking pilferage, the slackening of sexual self-control--all these are symptomatic like the furred tongue, subnormal heat, and muddy eye. Like the hard drinker next morning, we suffer a touch of Hamlet's complaint, the malady of the dyspeptic soul, of indolent kings and of pampered youth before it has found any man's work to try itself on-- How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable To me are all the uses of the world! Not the despair of the battered, vanquished, or oppressed, but the moping of the relaxed, the surfeited, or the morbid. Glad as we all were to be done with the war, its ends left even the strongest of us a little let down, as the ends of other long and intense excitements, good or bad, do. As Ibsen's young woman out in search of thrills would have said, there were harps in the air during the war. Many of them were disagreeable in their timbre, but still they were harps. Since the war a good many of the weaker vessels have somehow failed to find harps in the air, though there are really plenty of them in full vibration. So they have run about looking for little pick-me-ups and nips of something mildly exciting to keep up to par their sagging sense of the adventuresomeness of life. Derby sweeps never had such a vogue; every kind of gamble has boomed; dealers in public entertainment have found that the rawest sensationalism pays better than ever--anything that will give a fillip, any poor new-whisky fillip, to jaded nerves. III