His education, too, such as it is, is one which makes me respect him as one of a class. Of course, he is sometimes one of those “gents” whom Punch so ruthlessly holds up to just ridicule. He is sometimes a vulgar fop, sometimes fond of low profligacy—of betting-houses and casinos. Well—I know no class in any age or country among which a fool may not be found here and there. But that the “gent” is the average type of this class, I should utterly deny from such experience as I have had. The peculiar note and mark of the average clerk and shopman, is, I think, in these days, intellectual activity, a keen desire for self-improvement and for independence, honourable, because self-acquired. But as he is distinctly a creature of the city; as all city influences bear at once on him more than on any other class, so we see in him, I think, more than in any class, the best and the worst effects of modern city life. The worst, of course, is low profligacy; but of that I do not speak here. I mean that in the same man the good and evil of a city life meet. And in this way. In a countryman like me, coming up out of wild and silent moorlands into a great city, the first effect of the change is increased intellectual activity. The perpetual stream of human faces, the innumerable objects of interest in every shop-window, are enough to excite the mind to action, which is increased by the simple fact of speaking to fifty different human beings in the day instead of five. Now in the city-bred youth this excited state of mind is chronic, permanent. It is denoted plainly enough by the difference between the countryman’s face and that of the townsman. The former in its best type (and it is often very noble) composed, silent, self-contained, often stately, often listless; the latter mobile, eager, observant, often brilliant, often self-conscious. Now if you keep this rapid and tense mind in a powerful and healthy body, it would do right good work. Right good work it does, indeed, as it is; but still it might do better. For what are the faults of this class? What do the obscurantists (now, thank God, fewer every day) allege as the objection to allowing young men to educate themselves out of working hours? They become, it is said, discontented, conceited, dogmatical. They take up hasty notions, they condemn fiercely what they have no means of understanding; they are too fond of fine words, of the excitement of spouting themselves, and hearing others spout. Well. I suppose there must be a little truth in the accusation, or it would not have been invented. There is no smoke without fire; and these certainly are the faults of which the cleverest middle-class young men whom I know are most in danger.