“Duchess of Devonshire.”  She is only beautiful because, at the back of all, the English people wanted her to be beautiful.  In the same way, the lads at Oxford and Cambridge are only larking because England, in the depths of its solemn soul, really wishes them to lark.  All this is very human and pardonable, and would be even harmless if there were no such things in the world as danger and honour and intellectual responsibility.  But if aristocracy is a vision, it is perhaps the most unpractical of all visions.  It is not a working way of doing things to put all your happiest people on a lighted platform and stare only at them.  It is not a working way of managing education to be entirely content with the mere fact that you have (to a degree unexampled in the world) given the luckiest boys the jolliest time.  It would be easy enough, like the writer in the Outlook, to enjoy the pleasures and deny the perils.  Oh what a happy place England would be to live in if only one did not love it!

WOMAN

A correspondent has written me an able and interesting letter in the matter of some allusions of mine to the subject of communal kitchens.  He defends communal kitchens very lucidly from the standpoint of the calculating collectivist; but, like many of his school, he cannot apparently grasp that there is another test of the whole matter, with which such calculation has nothing at all to do.  He knows it would be cheaper if a number of us ate at the same time, so as to use the same table.  So it would.  It would also be cheaper if a number of us slept at different times, so as to use the same pair of trousers.  But the question is not how cheap are we buying a thing, but what are we buying?  It is cheap to own a slave.  And it is cheaper still to be a slave.

My correspondent also says that the habit of dining out in restaurants, etc., is growing.  So, I believe, is the habit of committing suicide.  I do not desire to connect the two facts together.  It seems fairly clear that a man could not dine at a restaurant because he had just committed suicide; and it would be extreme, perhaps, to suggest that he commits suicide because he has just dined at a restaurant.  But the two cases, when put side by side, are enough to indicate the falsity and poltroonery of this eternal modern argument from what is in fashion.  The question for brave men is not whether a certain thing is increasing; the question is whether we are increasing it.  I dine very often in restaurants because the nature of my trade makes it convenient:  but if I thought that by dining in restaurants I was working for the creation of communal meals, I would never enter a restaurant again; I would carry bread and cheese in my pocket or eat chocolate out of automatic machines.  For the personal element in some things is sacred.  I heard Mr. Will Crooks put it perfectly the other day:  “The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door.”