trained them into desk or farm machines; trained them so that
their souls were starved, driven in on themselves, and there stifled,
and at last eaten away by the canker of their murky routine.

I looked at those children as they stood before me. I looked at their
bright, clear faces, their eyes wonder-wide, their clean brows alert for
knowledge, hungry for life and its beauty. Despite their hideous
clothes, they were the poetry of the world: all that is young and fresh
and lovely. Then I thought of them five years hence, their minds larded
with a Sound Commercial Education, tramping the streets of the City from
nine o'clock in the morning until six o'clock in the evening, living in
an atmosphere of intellectual vacuity, their ardent temperaments fled,
their souls no longer desiring beauty. I felt a little sick.

But The Gentleman.... The Gentleman stood there in a lilac light, and
took unction unto himself. He smiled benignly, a smile of sincere
pleasure. Then he called the children to attention while he read to
them a prayer of St. Chrysostom, which he thought most suitable to
their position in life. A ring of gas-jets above his head hovered like
an aureole.

* * * * *

I do wish that something could somehow be done to restrain the
Benevolent. We are so fond, as a nation, of patronizing that if we have
nothing immediately at hand to patronize, we must needs go out into the
highways and hedges and bring in anything we can find, any old thing, so
long as we can patronize it. I have often thought of starting a League
(I believe it would be immensely popular) for The Suppression of Social
Service. The fussy, incompetent men and women who thrust themselves
forward for that work are usually the last people who should rightly
meddle with it. They either perform it from a sense of duty, or what
they themselves call The Social Conscience (the most nauseous kind of
benevolence), or they play with it because it is Something To Do. Always
their work is discounted by personal vanity. I like the Fabians: they
are funny without being vulgar. But these Social Servants and their
Crusades for Pure and Holy Living Among Work-Girls are merely fatuous
and vulgar when they are not deliberately insulting. Can you conceive a
more bitter mind than that which calls a girl of the streets a Fallen
Sister? Yet that is what these people have done; they have labelled a
house with the device of The Midnight Crusade f