The English are a nation of employed persons. Wherever you go, from Berwick to Land's End, you will find that in the main the men you meet are somebody's employees. The better kind of them possibly write "manager" on their cards; some of them even are managing directors; others, again, are partners in wealthy houses or heads of such houses. Yet, as I have said, they strike you almost to a man as being in somebody's employment. Even the most prosperous of them have the strained, repressed, furtive look which comes of the long turning of other people's little wheels; while the masses, the employed English masses, give you, as regards appearance, physique, and habit of mind alike, an excellent notion of what a galley-slave must have been. The fact of being employed is indeed the only big and abiding fact in the average Englishman's life. It has its effect on the whole man from the time of his youth to the time of his death; it influences his actions and the trend of his thoughts to a far greater extent than any other force--love and religion included. In the Englishman's view, to be employed is the only road to subsistence, and, if one be ambitious, the only road to honour. He must work for somebody, otherwise he cannot be happy. The notion of working for himself appals him; and if by any chance he be persuaded to take the plunge, the consideration that he has no master weighs so heavily upon him that his end is usually speedy ruin of one sort or another. That is to say, he either takes advantage of his freedom to the extent of doing no work at all, or, in the absence of the guiding hand, he loses his judgment and throws to the winds the caution that kept him his place. It is a pity, there can be no doubt; but the thing is in the English blood. If you are an Englishman, you must be employed; if you are unemployed, you are unhappy, and worse. For a full century the rich merchants, enterprising manufacturers, colliery-owners, mill-owners, and what not, in whom the English put their trust, have been preaching and fomenting this doctrine by every means in their power. To their aid in spreading the glorious truth they have brought the moralists and the Churches: "'if a man will not work, neither shall he eat.' 'Servants, obey your masters.' Punctuality is the soul of business. Be faithful over a few things. Begin at the bottom rung of the ladder. Mr. So-and-so, the notorious billionaire, was once a poor working-boy in Manchester. Furthermore, if you _don't_ work and at our price--well, to say the least of it, God will not love you."