Trade was no bar to good society till it was able to buy it and there was a great mingling of classes now rigidly separated. This feeling of shame for having practised some perfectly reputable calling has had I believe very serious results. It has made for the separation of employers and employed. It has caused people to take less pride in integrity and thoroughness and made them desirous of amassing wealth in order to enjoy ease. It has tended to make those of the second generation more desirous to pose as nobles than to follow the calling of their fathers. It has destroyed a commercial aristocracy and has put a plutocracy in its place. It tended for a time to substitute prudery and respectability for real Christianity; and, before the war at least, even these poor substitutes were growing so out of fashion as to be regretted. It has also deepened the rift between classes. Between the old nobility and the poor there was a certain sympathy. The humbler class appreciated the fact that their rulers were gentlemen, they liked their courage, their courtesy, they did not even object to being ordered by them, their very vices were comprehensible. But they have never had any fellow feeling with a plutocracy; with their present pay-masters they have been more impatient than with their former rulers; and the difficulties of the present age are in no small degree due to the snobbery which Thackeray denounced. LECTURE VIII SPORT, AND RURAL ENGLAND I hope you will pardon the flippancy of the subject I am about to introduce; but I may say that it is not possible to understand English life without studying it. Though we are getting close to our own times, yet it is evident that society has undergone an almost complete change since the scenes were depicted in the works I am using to-day. Surtees caught the exact moment when the change was coming; and the old order was awaiting the signal to quit the world. In the rural England of the ‘forties’ and ‘fifties,’ when the railway was just beginning to invade the countryside, the hunting field was still a national playground where neighbours met, the county family still the pivot round which rural life moved. But everywhere are signs of the coming change. The _nouveau riche_ was buying the old estates, and the Jewish magnate beginning to make his appearance; but the fabric of county society remained as yet unshaken. I can myself remember the gulf that parted socially the county from the town, the landed gentry from the professional classes, when the ownership of land was far more important than the possession of wealth.