Now it is only due to the characteristic obtuseness and shallowness of this Age, that no attention has been paid to the unhappiness of the wealthier classes, which in many instances is very severe indeed; and it is due to the absurdly exalted notion of their prestige, and their own extravagant estimate of their dignity, that they themselves have not made more clamour to call the attention of the community to their misery. Labouring under the utterly unsupported modern belief that where economic conditions are sound, everything is sound, we do not find the leaders of the Church organising missions to the mansions of the wealthy in order to make sure that their spiritual life is healthy and free from the blights of gloom and despair; obsessed as everyone is by the supposed inaccessibility of wealth to the common spiritual distempers of the Age, we never hear of charitable charwomen undertaking a course of district visiting to the women of the wealthier classes, in order to investigate the cause of their despondency and to help them to overcome it. And yet, strange as such a procedure would sound to modern ears, is it really so palpably offensive to good sense? The very fact [p168] that most people would suspect a man of joking who recommended such action, shows conclusively how far we are from realising the extent of the spiritual misery, besottedness and turpitude prevailing among our wealthier classes. Is this misery to be left entirely suspended in the air by the proposed economic reforms of the coming era? As a symptom it has been shown that the unhappiness of the wealthier classes is as important and significant as any other phenomenon of modern times. Do people really suppose that certain economic changes, certain improvements in the standard of living of the poor, are going to set the whole world right, including the chronic unhappiness of the present wealthy classes? It has been suggested that this unhappiness of the wealthy has a deep root, and that at its root it joins with the unhappiness of the indigent. How can any tinkering at material conditions possibly be expected to reach that root? If social reformers had their way, if in their superficial analysis of modern misery, they were allowed to proceed with their “improvements,” the changes they would be able to bring about would leave absolutely intact the whole of the major cause of the trouble that obsesses them. In a trice the “improved” conditions would become habitual conditions, and then, once the diversion had spent its force, the old unhappiness would return with possibly even greater malignity. Anybody who doubts this is invited to dwell on the economic improvements already achieved among the poorer classes of the nation, and to assess the proportionate [p169] amount of increased happiness that has accompanied them.