f those who have lifted hands against the
universe.

The reverence of middle age for the wealthier geniuses of waste,
however, cannot be explained on grounds like these. One does not think
of Lord Tomnoddy or Sir Alexander Soapsuds as a warrior against
destiny. The prodigality of the rich appeals to us for quite other
reasons than does the prodigality of the prodigal. We endure it
chiefly because we envy it. The dream of being a rich man who can
thrust out men and women from their homes to make room for pheasants,
who by sheer economic pressure can force us to make bonbons for his
guests when we ought to be making boots for ourselves, who can take a
man who might be a duke and turn him into a flunkey, lulls us into a
kind of satisfaction with the world. The man who has the power to
waste fields and men and women and money and labour is the king who
rules in every vulgar heart among us. His royal wastefulness in food
and servants and ornaments brings him, it may be granted, not a
teaspoonful of added health or an eggcupful more of happiness. Even
the poets, who have so often sung for rich masters, have always had
the grace to warn them that over-eating and over-drinking and
over-confidence in this world's goods were merely three death's-heads
dressed up in seductive bonnets. But the truth is we never believe the
poets when once we have laid down the book. Our ideal of wastefulness
is firmly rooted in us beyond the attacks of any aesthete with his
harmless little quiver of phrases.

Even when we are not rich ourselves we can imitate the rich in their
wastefulness. There is nothing the average servant scorns more than
the house in which she is expected to make use of the torsos of
loaves, and in which she is forbidden to sacrifice odds and ends of
meat to the little gods of the dust-bin. She loves the house where
there is milk for the sink as well as for the children and the cat.
Years ago, when some people were advocating a tax on salt, they did so
on the ground that no one need suffer since at present everybody puts
on his plate several times as much salt as he ever uses. Hence, if we
were more careful with the salt, such a tax would be a tax not on salt
but on wastefulness. It is the same with mustard. I remember a
Scotsman once asking me in a hushed voice if I knew how Colman had
made his fortune. I thought from my friend's solemn air that it must
have been in some sensational way--by buying a deserted gold-mine or