spiritual pride. He was trying to make himself
equal to the manual labourer who carries large bags of tools on the Tube
and sighs heavily as he lays them on your foot. I am sure that he was tired
of being scornfully regarded by manual labourers, and was determined to
make it quite clear that he too had done, or was about to do, a day's
labour, and manual labour at that. It was a sinful motive and it deserved
to be punished; but it was natural. Nowadays we all feel like that. We
caught it from the War, when the great thing was to show that you were
doing more work than anybody else.

I take from a recent copy of _Hansard_[1] the following brisk and delicate
piece of dialogue:--

"Mr. MACQUISTEN: You Labour men have forgotten what sweat is.

Mr. W. THORNE: I have never seen many lawyers sweat, anyhow.

Mr. SPEAKER: This discussion is becoming intemperate.

AN HON. MEMBER: The Hon. Member for Springburn never sweated in his life.

Mr. MACQUISTEN: Yes, I have laboured in the docks."

That is it, you see. Sweating is the great criterion of usefulness to-day.
If you cannot show that you have sweated in the past, you must at least
show that you are sweating now, or have every intention of sweating in a
moment or two. Personally, as a private secretary, I find it very
difficult, though I do my best. As a private secretary I labour in a rich
house in the notoriously idle neighbourhood of South Kensington, where
nobody would believe that anybody laboured, much less perspired over it. So
when I pass, on the way to my rich house, a builder's labourer or a milkman
or a dustman, I have to exhibit as clearly as I can all the signs of a
harsh employment and industrial fatigue. I take great pains about this; I
walk much faster; I frown heavily and I look as pale as possible. In the
Tube I close my eyes. I hope all this is effective, but as far as I can see
the milkman never looks at me, and the builder is always saying to another
builder, "'E says to me, 'Wot abaht it?' 'e says, and I says to 'im, 'Yus,
wot abaht it?' I says." But it is worth the effort.

Well, that is why that poor man was carrying a typewriter. I wonder why
everybody else in the Tube carries an "attache-case." It has been
calculated that if all the attache-cases which get on to the train at
Hammersmith at 9 A.M. were left on the platform, six men or twelve women or
three horses could take their place in every car. That means about ninety
more men or one-hundre