of
well-to-do people, a fraction of the whole English population--and with
a few country-bred people and open-air workers, that we succeed. The
great masses of the English nation are tending to become the
insignificant, indistinguishable, unwholesome, and shabby crowd that
becomes visible at football matches and on Bank Holidays upon the Heath.

It is true that familiarity breeds respect. It is almost impossible for
the average educated man to know anything whatever about the working
classes. The educated and the workpeople move, as it were, in worlds of
different dimensions, incomprehensible to each other. Very few men and
women from our secondary schools and universities, for instance, can
long enjoy solemnly tickling the faces of passing strangers with a bunch
of feathers, or revolving on a wooden horse to a steam organ, or gazing
at a woman advertised as "a Marvel of Flesh, Fat, and Beauty." The
educated seldom appreciate such joys in themselves. If they like trying
them, it is only "in the second intention." They enjoy out of patronage,
or for literary sensation, rather than in grave reality. They are
excluded from the mind to which such things genuinely appeal. But let
not education mock, nor culture smile disdainfully at the short and
simple pleasures of the poor. If by some miracle of revelation culture
could once become familiar from the inside with one of those scrubby and
rather abhorrent families, the insignificance would be transfigured, the
faces would grow distinguishable, and all manner of admired and even
lovable characteristics would be found. How sober people are most days
of the week; how widely charitable; how self-sacrificing in hopes of
saving the pence for margarine or melted fat upon the children's bread!
They are shabby, but they have paid for every scrap of old clothing with
their toil; they are dirty, but they try to wash, and would be clean if
they could afford the horrible expense of cleanliness; they are
ignorant, but within twenty years how enormously their manners to each
other have improved! And then consider their Christian thoughtlessness
for the morrow, how superb and spiritual it is! How different from the
things after which the Gentiles of the commercial classes seek! On a
Bank Holiday I have known a mother and a daughter, hanging over the very
abyss of penury, to spend two shillings in having their fortunes told.
Could the lilies of the field or Solomon in all his glory have shown