running a South American revolution. But my friend merely pointed to
the plate from which I was eating. "He made it," he declared solemnly,
"out of mustard you leave on the edge of your plate."

Perhaps the Scotsman was right in shaking his head so gravely over our
extravagance in mustard. But somehow I, too, have the kitchen's taste
for superfluities, and enough never seems half so good as a little
more. Horace described the happy man as the man who had enough and
something over for servants and thieves. "Oh, the little more, and how
much it is!" Even if we grudge it to the thieves, we love it because
of the sense it gives us that we are no longer struggling in the water
but sitting in triumph on the dry land. The average Englishman
dislikes Tariff Reform, not entirely because he has grasped the
economics of the subject, but because it would bring in a system which
would compel him to be as thrifty as a Frenchman and as careful as a
German. One must admit to a certain degree of sympathy with him. When
one hears of French peasants (as I once did) calling round after the
meals of the rich to carry off the scrapings of the plates to make
soup for their families, and of their doing this not because they were
very poor, but because they were very thrifty, one's heart suddenly
rejoices at the sight of the tattered old flag of prodigality again.
One does not want to see thrift given the extreme character of an
orgy.

On the other hand, a good many of us get an easy sense of the heroic
by living in lordly wastefulness. It appeals to us as a kind of
enlargement of our personality. That is why so many of us shrink with
horror from such social economies as a kitchen or a heating apparatus
that would serve a street. We like our own fires and our own bad
cookery. It is as childish as if we wanted our own footpath and our
own moon, and no doubt we would insist on these if we could. We
pretend that romance would leave the world if the sausages were turned
by a citizen in a municipal cap of liberty instead of by a wage-slave,
and that freedom would be dead if we warmed our toes at a civic fire.
I wonder that no one takes exception to the communal warmth of the
sun.

The present wastefulness would be little worse than an insane joke if
all this multiplying of cooks and parlourmaids did not absorb such an
amount of reluctant youth and deftness and energy. But, alas! our
ideals of private citizenship seldom mean that we do our work
p