WALTER TYNDALE
Both of us were well informed upon the scale that differentiated the labourer with fifty pounds a year from the manufacturer earning, by the employment of labourers, from ten to one hundred or more thousands a year; or between a parson with a dozen children and a stipend of eighty to one hundred and fifty pounds a year from a Carnegie, with one child and millions a year. These things worried George Meredith in his late years. He wrote letters about them, and he talked to me about them at Box Hill, where I went to make studies for his portrait. They worry everybody save the selfish rich.
But these extremes, it may be said, are no worse than they have always been, excepting in one respect—the taste to expend. It is absurd to blame the strong, i.e. the wealthy, merely because they are strong. Where they are open to criticism is the way they use their strength, or chiefly because they hoard it. A man who does not keep a yacht or a racing stable can live luxuriously on from two to five thousand pounds a year. If he has twenty or thirty thousand a year and invests the balance in stocks and shares, instead of spending it tastefully, he is a hoarder, if not a miser, and is not doing half his duty to his community. There is where I differ from most of the Radicals, for no one admires strength and inequality more than I do.
The inequalities in the universe make it go round instead of flying apart, hold it together instead of disintegrating it. A few fools and many rogues think equality would be heavenly, but it would be deadly dull.
Walter Tyndale soon became fascinated with the East, where he was obliged to pass the winters in order to escape the injurious effects upon his health of the coal-smoke of London. Here his tastes for the beauty of contours and of
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