The great ladies of the eighteenth century do not seem to have thought of work as a distraction when pleasures began to pall. They would have been bored to extinction at the idea. The worship of work is a characteristic of the nineteenth century. Those who do not work for profit work for the sake of the occupation, at some self-imposed task. The great philanthropic current, using the adjective to describe all forms of social amelioration, has drawn into its stream numbers of recruits from the so-called leisured classes. Indeed it is the members of this class who largely carry on works of general usefulness. England has become the country of volunteers in the public service. The eighteenth century worshipped idleness. It looked upon labour as ignoble. This view of life had its effect on the bringing-up of girls in the higher ranks. They were bred to idleness as their proper vocation. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, writing to her daughter, Lady Bute, in 1753, about the education of the Countess’s daughter, says-- “I could give many examples of ladies whose ill-conduct has been very notorious, which has been owing to that ignorance which has exposed them to idleness, which is justly called the mother of mischief. There is nothing so like the education of a woman of quality as that of a prince: they are taught to dance, and the exterior part of what is called good breeding, which if they attain, they are extraordinary creatures in their kind, and have all the accomplishments required by their directors. The same characters are formed by the same lessons, which inclines me to think (if I dare say it), that nature has not placed us in an inferior rank to men, no more than the females of other animals, where we see no distinction of capacity; though I am persuaded that if there was a commonwealth of rational horses (as Dr. Swift has supposed), it would be an established maxim among them that a mare could not be taught to pace.”