If the wages be 40_s._ a week the condition is still one to depress those who on Sunday bless God for their creation. The skilled artisan, having paid rent and club money and provided household necessaries, has no margin out of which to provide for pleasure, for old age, or even for the best medical skill. There can be for him no quiet hours with books or pictures, while his children or friends make music for his solace. He can invite no friends for a Christmas dance; he can wander in the thought of no future of pleasure or of rest. England is the land of sad monuments. The saddest monument is, perhaps, ‘the respectable working man,’ who has been erected in honour of Thrift. His brains, which might have shown the world how to save men, have been spent in saving pennies; his life, which might have been happy and full, has been dulled and saddened by taking ‘thought for the morrow.’ This ought not so to be, and this will not always be. The question therefore naturally occurs, ‘Why should not the State provide what is needed?’ This is the question to which the Socialist is ready with many a response. Some of his suggestions, even if good, are impracticable. It may be urged, for instance, that relief works should be started, that State workshops should be opened, and starvation made impossible. Or it may be urged that the land should be nationalised and large incomes divided. To such suggestions, and to many like them, it is a sufficient answer that they are impracticable. Their attainment, even were it desirable, is not within measurable distance, and to press them is likely to distract attention from what is possible. If a boy who goes out ‘in the interest of the fox’ can spoil a hunt by dragging a herring across the scent, a well-meaning socialist may hinder reform by drawing a fair fancy across the line of men’s imagination. All real progress must be by growth; the new must be a development of the old, and not a branch added on from another root. A change which does not fit into and grow out of things that already exist is not a practicable change, and such are some of the changes now advocated by socialists upon platforms. The condition of the people is one not to be long endured, but the answer to the question, ‘What can the State do?’ must be a practicable one, or we shall waste time, make mistakes, rouse up anarchy, and destroy much that is good. Facing, then, the whole position, we see that among the majority of Englishmen life is poor; that among the few life is made rich. The thoughts stored in books, the beauty rescued from nature and preserved in pictures, the intercourse made possible by means of steam locomotion, stir powers in the few which lie asleep in the many. If it be true, as the poet says, that men ‘live by admiration,’ it is the few who live, for it is they who know that which is worth admiration.