associated with careless injury to the general convenience, that there is revealed the remotest possibility of a deliberate “class war” between the rich and the poor. Feudal England is dying, and the attempt to transform a caste basis of land and breeding into a caste basis of material possession seems doomed to failure. But it will fail less from external assault than from the inability of the inheritors of great fortune to maintain the energies and devotions through which that fortune has been made. “The Conquerors” will leave little bitterness behind them. There may even remain, in the memory of a more exacting age to come, a pleasant recollection of those who upheld, in time of tranquillity, a standard of manners and a tradition of kindliness, duty, and courage before life’s lesser ills. From public schools, which profess to teach “character” rather than to stimulate intelligence, through universities encouraging large expenditure on comfort, limitless bodily exercise, and an exiguous standard of intellectual effort, they pass to the “truly national manners and characteristics” which M. Prévost so much admires. In country residence, in solid aggregation in the metropolis, in lesser imitative effort amongst the provincial cities, they have cherished a code of hospitality, courtesy, criticism, mild and generous interest in public and private affairs. If that code is in part vanishing before the influx of the new “Super-wealth,” it yet exhibits, in the present generation, a still active power of assimilation. Not for conspicuous crimes, for selfishness, for class exclusiveness, or for insolence will this society be judged and condemned by the progress of time. It will pass--if it passes--because it is mistaking abnormal and insecure experience for the normal and secure; because an unwillingness to face reality is gradually developing a confusion between reality and illusion; because in its prosperity it may be stricken with blindness to the signs of the time. CHAPTER III THE SUBURBANS