The paradise towards which the _bourgeoisie_ strive is not the leisure to refine the mind, but the opportunity to vie with the more commonplace section of the upper class in dissipation. The labourer who resents the lordling's contumely, and indicts him for living a lazy life, may only work when he is starving, and perhaps not then. His ideal may rise no higher than perpetual beer and ninepins, while the squire craves no higher satisfaction in life than hunting six days a week, and champagne, billiards, and the sporting papers on Sunday. The evil is in the setting up of a barbaric aim of life in all classes. Our greatest ideals are the commercial and the voluptuous. The eternal pursuit of the frivolous, which makes up the chief part of what is foolishly termed "high life," and the sordid middle-class struggle to amass money, are accepted by the shallow as tokens of our progress in civilisation. We are rich and luxurious; we are therefore far above the savage. Yet how far? Our leisured and affluent have for the greater number returned to the employment of a pre-pastoral epoch. Look at the lives of thousands of English gentlemen. Truer barbarians never existed of old than many of those whose whole thought, energy, and wealth are given up to sport. Many of them are restless nomads, ever hurrying from one quarter of the globe to another in search of fresh game to kill. I do not underrate the need for the development of the physical man, nor ignore the value of sports rightly comprehended as a means to the end of training and recreating the body. But what shall be said of that multitude of our countrymen who live to amuse themselves in such primitive fashion? It is these who waste their powers, and barbarise the vulgar by the force of ill example. Let us not wonder that, in bygone days, a gaping peasantry, with quaint uncouth notions of what constituted an efficient mouthpiece of their wants, yelled at the hustings for the return of those who rode straight, and could pummel the best man of the mob in a brace of rounds. Of such order are still the credentials in some of the Pagan constituencies, where the beer-steeped intelligence pleads the election of "an old-fashioned sort and a thorough sportsman." We are still rearing these rude types in our public schools and universities, and for these we laudably reserve the chief places on the senate, on justiciary benches, and in local boards. Despite their educational chances and social opportunities, these are surely among the retrograde, with their _argot_ culled from the racing journals, their strange drawling pronunciation of the English tongue, their points of breeding, their caddish _hauteur_, their rampant John Bullisms, and their innate aversion to thought and earnestness. "The fop of Charles's time," says Leslie, in Mr. Mallock's "New Republic," "aimed at seeming a wit and a scholar. The fop of ours aims at being a fool and a dunce."