as possible another person--a
country gentleman who has never heard of his shop; one whose left hand
holding a gun knows not what his right hand doeth in a ledger. He uses
a peerage as an alias, and a large estate as a sort of alibi. A stern
Scotch minister remarked concerning the game of golf, with a terrible
solemnity of manner, "the man who plays golf--he neglects his
business, he forsakes his wife, he forgets his God." He did not seem
to realise that it is the chief aim of many a modern capitalist's life
to forget all three.

This abandonment of a boyish vanity in work, this substitution of a
senile vanity in indolence, this is the first respect in which the
rich Englishman has fallen. He was more of a man when he was at least
a master-workman and not merely a master. And the second important
respect in which he was better at the beginning is this: that he did
then, in some hazy way, half believe that he was enriching other
people as well as himself. The optimism of the early Victorian
Individualists was not wholly hypocritical. Some of the
clearest-headed and blackest-hearted of them, such as Malthus, saw
where things were going, and boldly based their Manchester city on
pessimism instead of optimism. But this was not the general case; most
of the decent rich of the Bright and Cobden sort did have a kind of
confused faith that the economic conflict would work well in the long
run for everybody. They thought the troubles of the poor were
incurable by State action (they thought that of all troubles), but
they did not cold-bloodedly contemplate the prospect of those troubles
growing worse and worse. By one of those tricks or illusions of the
brain to which the luxurious are subject in all ages, they sometimes
seemed to feel as if the populace had triumphed symbolically in their
own persons. They blasphemously thought about their thrones of gold
what can only be said about a cross--that they, being lifted up, would
draw all men after them. They were so full of the romance that anybody
could be Lord Mayor, that they seemed to have slipped into thinking
that everybody could. It seemed as if a hundred Dick Whittingtons,
accompanied by a hundred cats, could all be accommodated at the
Mansion House. It was all nonsense; but it was not (until later) all
humbug.

Step by step, however, with a horrid and increasing clearness, this
man discovered what he was doing. It is generally one of the worst
discoveries a man can make.