that a man may spend vast sums on pursuits which do not educate him in anything worth knowing, but the advantage is that with habits of free expenditure the germs of thought are well tilled and watered, whereas parsimony denies them every external help. The most spending class in Europe is the English gentry, it is also the class most strikingly characterized by a high general average of information;[5] the most parsimonious class in Europe is the French peasantry; it is also the class most strikingly characterized by ignorance and intellectual apathy. The English gentleman has cultivated himself by various reading and extensive travel, but the French peasant will not go anywhere except to the market-town, and could not pardon the extravagance of buying a book, or a candle to read it by in the evening. Between these extremes we have various grades of the middle classes in which culture usually increases very much in proportion to the expenditure. The rule is not without its exceptions; there are rich vulgar people who spend a great deal without improving themselves at all--who only, by unlimited self-indulgence, succeed in making themselves so uncomfortably sensitive to every bodily inconvenience that they have no leisure, even in the midst of an unoccupied life, to think of anything but their own bellies and their own skins--people whose power of attention is so feeble that the smallest external incident distracts it, and who remember nothing of their travels but a catalogue of trivial annoyances. But people of this kind do not generally belong to families on whom wealth has had time to produce its best effects. What I mean is, that a family which has been for generations in the habit of spending four thousand a year will usually be found to have a more cultivated one than one that has only spent four hundred. I have come to the recognition of this truth very reluctantly indeed, not because I dislike rich people, but merely because they are necessarily a very small minority, and I should like every human being to have the best benefits of culture if it were only possible. The plain living and high thinking that Wordsworth so much valued is a cheering ideal, for most men have to live plainly, and if they could only think with a certain elevation we might hope to solve the great problem of human life, the reconciliation of poverty and the soul. There certainly is a slow movement in that direction, and the shortening of the hours of labor may afford some margin of leisure; but we who work for culture every day and all day long, and still feel that we know very little, and have hardly skill enough to make any effective use of the little that we know, can scarcely indulge in very enthusiastic anticipations of the future culture of the poor.