e the people
concerned no one is a penny the better or worse. And not many miles away
hundreds of thousands of men are living in the mud of rat-infested
trenches, with the sky raining destruction upon them, and death and
mutilation the hourly incident of their lives. They have no retaining fee
and no refresher. Their reward is a shilling a day, and it would take them
20,000 days to "earn" what one K.C. pockets each night. Could the mind
conceive a more grotesque inversion of the law of services and rewards? You
die for your country at a shilling a day, while at home Snubbin, K.C., is
perspiring for his client at L100 a day.

This is old, cheap, and profitless stuff, you say. What is the good of
drawing these contrasts? We know all about them. They are a part of the
eternal inequality of things. Services and rewards never have had, and
never will have, any relation to each other. Please do not remind us that
Charlie Chaplin (or Charles Chaplin as he desires to be known) earns
L130,000 a year by playing the fool in front of a camera, and that
Wordsworth did not earn enough to keep himself in shoe-laces out of poetry
which has become an immortal possession of humanity, and had to beg a noble
nobody (the Earl of Lonsdale, I think) to get him a job as a stamp
distributor to keep him in bread and butter.

Do not, my dear sir, be alarmed, I am not going to work that ancient theme
off on you. And yet I think it is necessary sometimes to remind ourselves
of these things. It is especially necessary now when there is so much easy
talk about "equality of sacrifice," and so much easy forgetfulness of the
inequality of rewards. It is useful, too, to remind ourselves that riches
have no necessary relation to service. The genius for getting money is an
altogether different thing from the genius for service. I suppose the
Guinnesses (to take an example) are the richest people in Ireland. And I
suppose Tom Kettle was one of the poorest. But who will dare apply the
money test as the real measure of the values of these men to humanity--the
one fabulously rich by brewing the "black stuff," as they call it in
Ireland; the other glorious in his genius for spending himself, without a
thought of return, on every noble cause and dying freely for liberty in the
full tide of his powers? Which means the more to the world? Perhaps one
effect of the war will be to give us a saner standard of values in these
things--will teach us to look behind the mo