(2) Many years ago, George Gissing, than whom no English writer was better qualified to speak with authority on the question of rich and poor, made the following remark: “A being of superior intelligence regarding humanity with an eye of perfect understanding would discover that life was enjoyed every bit as much in the slum as in the palace.” In other words, it must have occurred to most thinking people that laughter, if heard at all, is heard quite as frequently in the kitchen as in the drawing-room,--that is to say, that happiness is relative, and that the possibility of ultimate adaptation to all conditions makes the degree of happiness enjoyed by each human being more or less uniform. At all events, the fact that material conditions are the first, which, if constant, cease to be noticed, and therefore cease to contribute actively to happiness, must have been observed by most people of ordinary acumen. It would therefore constitute a gross misunderstanding both of human nature and of life in general, to suppose that standards of living, even very much lower than those of our present unskilled labouring classes, would necessarily destroy happiness for those compelled to endure them. And, conversely, it would constitute a grave misconception of the nature of happiness to suppose that an improved standard of living necessarily brings happiness in its train, or has anything to do with happiness. All those who, for five years of the Great War, had to live on indifferent food, imperfectly cooked, served [p170] in inconvenient and frequently filthy quarters, and on unsightly and grubby utensils, will bear the present writer out in this, and will agree with him when he says that material conditions cannot possibly bear the deep causal relation to happiness that so many thousands of solemn would-be philosophers now allege. Beyond a certain point--that is to say, _when once the possibility of daily repletion with wholesome foodstuffs, and sufficient daily repose has been attained_, material conditions, so far from being conducive to happiness or unhappiness, are not even noticed. To improve the material conditions of the proletariat beyond the stage of comfortable security, therefore, will not and cannot increase their general happiness by one iota. It may urge them to the mad hedonism of the rich, it may drive them to the surfeited apathy and neurasthenia of the plutocratic classes and stimulate their appetite for new-fangled creeds and movements, but it will not increase their happiness, neither will it do anything to alleviate the misery that was analysed in the first half of this chapter, under which they, like the wealthier classes, are now groaning.