and gain, lessen the destructive struggle of snatching
and holding.

Now, as I have been trying to show, beauty, harmony, fitness, are of
the nature of the miraculous loaves and fishes: they can feed
multitudes and leave basketfuls for the morrow.

But the desire for such spiritual food is, you will again object,
itself a rarity, a product of leisure and comfort, almost a luxury.

Quite true. And you will remember, perhaps, that I have already
remarked that they are not to be expected either from the poor in
material comfort, nor from the poor in soul, since both of these are
condemned, the first by physical wretchedness, the second by spiritual
inactivity, to fight only for larger shares of material bread; with
the difference that this material bread is eaten by the poor, and made
into very ugly symbols of glory by the rich.

But, among those of us who are neither hungry nor vacuous, there is
not, generally speaking, much attempt to make the best of our
spiritual privileges. We teach our children, as we were taught
ourselves, to give importance only to the fact of exclusiveness,
expense, rareness, already necessarily obtruded far too much by our
struggling, imperfect civilisation. We are indeed angry with little
boys and girls if they enquire too audibly whether certain people are
rich or certain things cost much money, as little boys and girls are
apt to do in their very far from innocence; but we teach them by our
example to think about such things every time we stretch a point in
order to appear richer or smarter than we are. While, on the contrary,
we rarely insist upon the intrinsic qualities for which things are
really valuable, without which no trouble or money would be spent on
them, without which their difficulty of obtaining would, as in the
case of Dr. Johnson's musical performance, become identical with
impossibility. I wonder how many people ever point out to a child that
the water in a tank may be more wonderful and beautiful in its beryls
and sapphires and agates than all the contents of all the jewellers'
shops in Bond Street? Moreover, we rarely struggle against the
standards of fashion in our habits and arrangements; which standards,
in many cases, are those of our ladies' maids, butlers, tradesfolk,
and in all cases the standards of our less intelligent neighbours.
Nay, more, we sometimes actually cultivate in ourselves, we superfine
and aesthetic creatures, a preference for such kinds of enjoym