I fixed myself to work to-day. After all, I am not an idler. I earn my right to live. When I publish my History the world will be the richer by _something_, poor though it may be. I vow I have been more greatly, more nobly employed of late years, than I was when I earned my living at school-slavery teaching to children the most useless, the most disastrous, the most soul-cramping branch of knowledge wherewith pedagogues in their insensate folly have crippled the minds and blasted the lives of thousands of their fellow-creatures--elementary mathematics. There is no more reason for any human being on God’s earth to be acquainted with the Binomial Theorem or the Solution of Triangles--unless he is a professional scientist, when he can begin to specialise in mathematics at the same age as the lawyer begins to specialise in law or the surgeon in anatomy--than for him to be an expert in Choctaw, the Cabala or the Book of Mormon. I look back with feelings of shame and degradation to the days when, for the sake of a crust of bread, I prostituted my intelligence to wasting the precious hours of impressionable childhood, which could have been filled with so many beautiful and meaningful things, over this utterly futile and inhuman subject. It trains the mind--it teaches boys to think, they say. It doesn’t. In reality it is a cut and dried subject easy to fit into a school curriculum. Its sacrosanctity saves educationalists an enormous amount of trouble, and its chief use is to enable mindless young men from the universities to make a dishonest living by teaching it to others, who in their turn may teach it to a future generation. I am mad to-night--why have I indulged in this diatribe against mathematics? I must find some vent, I suppose. I see now. I was saying that I earned my right to live, that I am not an idler. I cling strenuously to the claim. A man cannot command respect, even his own, by the mere reason of his _vie sentimentale_. And, after what I have done to-day, I must force my claim to the respect which on other grounds I have forfeited.