at the beginning of it. I had not twenty
shillings in hand at the end of it, and yet I had already learned what
hunger meant; not the bracing sensation of being sharp set and
enjoying one's meal, but the dull, deadening, sickly sensation which
comes of sustained work during weeks of bread and butter (or dripping)
diet, and none too much of that.

The devilish thing about an insufficient dietary is that it saps one's
manhood. Few people whose circumstances have been uniformly
comfortable realise that the stomach is the real seat of self-respect,
courage, dignity, good manners, and the higher sort of honour, not to
mention the spirits and emotions. Most would scoff at the suggestion,
of course, feeling that it showed the low nature of the suggester. And
the thing of it is they cannot possibly test the truth of it. For,
given an average share of self-control and will-power, any educated
person can starve him or herself for a week or more, deliberately and
of set purpose, without much inconvenience, with no difficulty, and no
loss of self-respect.

It is starvation, or semi-starvation _from necessity_, combined with a
hard-working routine of life, and without the soul-supporting
knowledge that one can stop and order a good meal whenever one
chooses; it is continuous and enforced lack of proper nutriment,
endured throughout sustained and unsuccessful efforts to overcome the
poverty that enforces it, that tells upon one's humanity and coarsens
the fibre of one's personality. There is a certain sustaining
exhilaration about voluntary abstinence from food, due to the
contemplation of one's mind's mastery. The reverse is true of the
hunger due to the unsuccess of one's efforts to obtain the wherewithal
to get better food and more of it.

Poverty is a teacher, a most powerful schoolmaster, I freely grant.
But the most of the lessons it teaches are lessons I had liefer not
learn. As a teacher its one vehicle of instruction is the cane. First,
it weakens and humiliates the pupil; and then, at every turn, it beats
him, teaching him to walk with cowering shoulders, furtive eyes, a
sour and suspicious mind. I have no good word to say for poverty; and
I believe an insufficient dietary to be infernally bad for any
one--worse, upon the whole, than an over-abundant one--and especially so
for young men or women who are striving to produce original work.

I have heard veterans criticise their sleek juniors, with a round
assertion that