Please remember, too, that there was nothing in their circumstances to check intemperance.  They were men of business:  that is, men for the most part engaged in routine work which exercized neither their minds nor their bodies to the full pitch of their capacities.  Compared with statesmen, first-rate professional men, artists, and even with laborers and artisans as far as muscular exertion goes, they were underworked, and could spare the fine edge of their faculties and the last few inches of their chests without being any the less fit for their daily routine.  If I had adopted their habits, a startling deterioration would have appeared in my writing before the end of a fortnight, and frightened me back to what they would have considered an impossible asceticism.  But they paid no penalty of which they were conscious.  They had as much health as they wanted:  that is, they did not feel the need of a doctor.  They enjoyed their smokes, their meals, their respectable clothes, their affectionate games with their children, their prospects of larger profits or higher salaries, their Saturday half holidays and Sunday walks, and the rest of it.  They did less than two hours work a day and took from seven to nine office hours to do it in.  And they were no good for any mortal purpose except to go on doing it.  They were respectable only by the standard they themselves had set.  Considered seriously as electors governing an empire through their votes, and choosing and maintaining its religious and moral institutions by their powers of social persecution, they were a black-coated army of calamity.  They were incapable of comprehending the industries they were engaged in, the laws under which they lived, or the relation of their country to other countries.  They lived the lives of old men contentedly.  They were timidly conservative at the age at which every healthy human being ought to be obstreperously revolutionary.  And their wives went through the routine of the kitchen, nursery, and drawing-room just as they went through the routine of the office.  They had all, as they called it, settled down, like balloons that had lost their lifting margin of gas; and it was evident that the process of settling down would go on until they settled into their graves.  They read old-fashioned newspapers with effort, and were just taking with avidity to a new sort of paper, costing a halfpenny, which they believed to be extraordinarily bright and attractive, and which never really succeeded until it became extremely dull, discarding all serious news and replacing it by vapid tittle-tattle, and substituting for political articles informed by at least some pretence of knowledge of economics, history, and constitutional law, such paltry follies and sentimentalities, snobberies and partisaneries, as ignorance can understand and irresponsibility relish.