ble to joys or ills--
A stone remote in some bleak gully of the hills!"

I hear the note of anguish: but the appeal itself passes me by. 'All this
personal dream' must flee: it is better that it should flee; nay, much of
our present bliss rests upon its transitoriness. But we can continue in
the children.

I think that perhaps the worst of having no children of their own is that
it makes, or tends to make, men and women indifferent to children in
general. I know, to be sure, that thousands of childless men and women
reach out (as it were) wistfully, almost passionately towards the young.
Still, I know numbers who care nothing for children, regard them as
nuisances, and yet regard themselves as patriots--though of a state which
presumably is to disappear in a few years, and with their acquiescence. I
own that a patriotism which sets up no hope upon its country's continuous
renewal and improvement, or even upon its survival beyond the next few
years, seems to me as melancholy as it is sterile.

Some of these good folk, for example, play the piano more sedulously than
that instrument, in my opinion, deserves; yet are mightily indignant, in
talk with me, at what they call the wickedness of teaching multitudes of
poor children to play upon pianos provided by the rates. As a historical
fact, very few poor children play or have ever played on pianos provided
by the rates. But I prefer, passing this correction over, to point out to
my indignant friends that the upper and middle classes in England are
ceasing to breed, and that therefore, unless the Anglo-Saxon race is to
lose one of its most cherished accomplishments--unless we are content to
live and see our national music ultimately confined to the jews' harp and
penny whistle--we must endow the children of the poor with pianos--or
perhaps as 'labour certificates' abbreviate the years at our disposal for
instruction, with pianolas, and so realise the American sculptor's grand
allegorical conception of 'Freedom presenting a Pianola to Fisheries and
the Fine Arts.'

To drop irony--and indeed I would expel it, if I could, once and for all
from these pages--I like recreation as much as most men, and have grown to
find it in the dull but deeply absorbing business of sitting on Education
Committees. Some fifteen years ago, in the first story in my first book
of short stories, I confessed to being haunted by a dreadful sound: 'the
footfall of a multitude more terrib