"The horse-leech of our material civilization, in which endless wealth and material luxury is thrown into the hands of one section of the community at the cost of others, has three daughters which cry ever: 'Give! Give! Give!' They are fastened on to the very vitals of our modern life, and they cry never--'It is enough.' "Fixed upon us as individuals, we hunger for more houses, more clothes, more furniture, more jewels, more shares, more dividends, whether we can use what we already have or not; and we hunger and strive after these things with as much passionate avidity as the savage after the hare, which if he nets will save him from death by starvation. "Fixed on us as nations we cry, 'More lands, more trade, more fruits of the labour of other men in other lands, higher dividends drawn from foreign countries; more--though our national skin should crack, and we burst and die of it at last--more!--more expansion!' "Oom and Tante, we beg of you, if you must partake of our nineteenth-century civilization with us, examine it carefully, and see what it is you are taking in. It is a brightly coloured flower, but at its centre sits a little gilded worm: if you must eat of it, eat the flower, but spew out carefully the worm, which spells death if once it fastens and breeds inside of you. "There are certain things indeed, good and fair, which have got embedded in this nineteenth-century civilization of ours, O Oom and Tante, like diamonds in a mud stream: which are in it, but necessarily not of it. "In the two centuries which have passed since you left Europe, certain things became common property which you know little of, and which are wholly good and fair; but we beg of you to understand they are not the outcome of that which comes to you with so much blare and glitter as 'nineteenth-century civilization'--the civilization of the bar, the stock exchange, the gambling saloon, the racecourse, gorgeous furniture, and ceaseless changing fashions; nor even of the railway train and the national debt. Do not think, we pray you, when you have grasped with both hands at the mud of our civilization, that you have therefore grasped the gems that may here and there be imbedded in it.