It is the same with holidays. To many families holidays mean a shortage of food, because there is less money coming into the home. All that Bank Holidays mean for the working-class mother is more worry, more anxiety, more difficulty in making ends meet. It is this which keeps people who live in small houses and mean streets at home when they should be out in the countryside enjoying the pure fresh air. It always appears to me that those who manage our affairs for us imagine that if workpeople were to enjoy holidays they would never want to go back to work again. I am not at all sure that, even were this the case, it would be so unmixed an evil as some of my friends think. It is sometimes said with a sneer that working people do not know how to use leisure--and working-class children, too; and good people like Mrs. Humphry Ward establish play centres in order to teach the children of the masses how to play. To my mind this is a most unnatural proceeding. Luckily for me I was brought up in a home set in the midst of a great open space on which I could play with my brothers and other children. We were never trained to play, but just played the same old games our fathers had played, till we were old enough to join sports clubs. All children should have the chance of meeting in the open air away from teachers, and be given the opportunity for developing their own powers of initiative. The man who toils for his bread is taught in the bitter school of experience that he must not expect holidays except as expensive luxuries. Even in Lancashire and Yorkshire, where, because the whole family works for wages, a holiday is possible, an annual week’s holiday at Blackpool or the Isle of Man is all that can be looked forward to. In this matter of holidays, contrast what I have said about the workmen with what happens to the other classes. The clerks and other salaried people are paid full pay for all public holidays, and are given a summer holiday which runs into one, two, or even four weeks at full pay. Of course such people know how to use their leisure; they have plenty of opportunity to learn. Let me repeat that the boy who goes to work in an office grows up accustomed to holidays on full pay, but the boy who goes into the workshop to hard manual labour grows to manhood well drilled in the belief that holidays are not for him unless he is prepared to lose his wages.