nd an Ideal Plumber. It is undoubtedly true that we
should laugh at the idea of an Ideal Postman; it is true, and it proves
that we are not genuine democrats.

Undoubtedly the modern grocer, if called upon to act in an Arcadian
manner, if desired to oblige with a symbolic dance expressive of the
delights of grocery, or to perform on some simple instrument while his
assistants skipped around him, would be embarrassed, and perhaps even
reluctant. But it may be questioned whether this temporary reluctance of
the grocer is a good thing, or evidence of a good condition of poetic
feeling in the grocery business as a whole. There certainly should be an
ideal image of health and happiness in any trade, and its remoteness
from the reality is not the only important question. No one supposes
that the mass of traditional conceptions of duty and glory are always
operative, for example, in the mind of a soldier or a doctor; that the
Battle of Waterloo actually makes a private enjoy pipeclaying his
trousers, or that the 'health of humanity' softens the momentary
phraseology of a physician called out of bed at two o'clock in the
morning. But although no ideal obliterates the ugly drudgery and detail
of any calling, that ideal does, in the case of the soldier or the
doctor, exist definitely in the background and makes that drudgery worth
while as a whole. It is a serious calamity that no such ideal exists in
the case of the vast number of honourable trades and crafts on which the
existence of a modern city depends. It is a pity that current thought
and sentiment offer nothing corresponding to the old conception of
patron saints. If they did there would be a Patron Saint of Plumbers,
and this would alone be a revolution, for it would force the individual
craftsman to believe that there was once a perfect being who did
actually plumb.

When all is said and done, then, we think it much open to question
whether the world has not lost something in the complete disappearance
of the ideal of the happy peasant. It is foolish enough to suppose that
the rustic went about all over ribbons, but it is better than knowing
that he goes about all over rags and being indifferent to the fact. The
modern realistic study of the poor does in reality lead the student
further astray than the old idyllic notion. For we cannot get the
chiaroscuro of humble life so long as its virtues seem to us as gross as
its vices and its joys as sullen as its sorrows. Proba