I dare not think of those I have left behind me, there in the ink-stained world.  It would make me miserable, and to what purpose?  Yet, having once looked that way, think of them I must.  Oh, you heavy-laden, who at this hour sit down to the cursed travail of the pen; writing, not because there is something in your mind, in your heart, which must needs be uttered, but because the pen is the only tool you can handle, your only means of earning bread!  Year after year the number of you is multiplied; you crowd the doors of publishers and editors, hustling, grappling, exchanging maledictions.  Oh, sorry spectacle, grotesque and heart-breaking!

Innumerable are the men and women now writing for bread, who have not the least chance of finding in such work a permanent livelihood.  They took to writing because they knew not what else to do, or because the literary calling tempted them by its independence and its dazzling prizes.  They will hang on to the squalid profession, their earnings eked out by begging and borrowing, until it is too late for them to do anything else—­and then?  With a lifetime of dread experience behind me, I say that he who encourages any young man or woman to look for his living to “literature,” commits no less than a crime.  If my voice had any authority, I would cry this truth aloud wherever men could hear.  Hateful as is the struggle for life in every form, this rough-and-tumble of the literary arena seems to me sordid and degrading beyond all others.  Oh, your prices per thousand words!  Oh, your paragraphings and your interviewings!  And oh, the black despair that awaits those down-trodden in the fray.

Last midsummer I received a circular from a typewriting person, soliciting my custom; some one who had somehow got hold of my name, and fancied me to be still in purgatory.  This person wrote:  “If you should be in need of any extra assistance in the pressure of your Christmas work, I hope,” etc.

How otherwise could one write if addressing a shopkeeper?  “The pressure of your Christmas work”!  Nay, I am too sick to laugh.

XIX.

Some one, I see, is lifting up his sweet voice in praise of Conscription.  It is only at long intervals that one reads this kind of thing in our reviews or newspapers, and I am happy in believing that most English people are affected by it even as I am, with the sickness of dread and of disgust.  That the thing is impossible in England, who would venture to say?  Every one who can think at all sees how slight are our safeguards against that barbaric force in man which the privileged races have so slowly and painfully brought into check.  Democracy is full of menace to all the finer hopes of civilization, and the revival, in not unnatural companionship with it, of monarchic power based on militarism, makes the prospect dubious enough.  There has but to arise some Lord of Slaughter, and the nations will be tearing at each other’s throats.  Let England be imperilled, and Englishmen will fight; in such extremity there is no choice.  But what a dreary change must come upon our islanders if, without instant danger, they bend beneath the curse of universal soldiering!  I like to think that they will guard the liberty of their manhood even beyond the point of prudence.