sober and honest and possessed of some little ability, may aspire to the position of a station storekeeper. If destitute of these advantages—and reduced ‘gentlemen’ are not by any means always sober, honest, and capable—the best thing he can do, if he gets the chance, is to settle down thankfully into the innocent occupation so earnestly desired by Henry the Sixth of the play, and so thriftily pursued by the alleged father of any amateur elocutionist whose name is Norval on the Grampian Hills.
Of such reduced ‘gentlemen’ it is often said that their education becomes their curse. Here is another little subterfuge. This is one of those taking expressions which are repeated from parrot to magpie till they seem to acquire axiomatic force. It is such men’s ignorance—their technical ignorance—that is their curse. Education of any kind never was, and never can be, a curse to its possessor; it is a curse only to the person whose interest lies in exploiting its possessor. Erudition, even in the humblest sphere of life, is the sweetest solace, the unfailing refuge, of the restless mind; but if the bearer thereof be not able to do something well enough to make a living by it, his education is simply outclassed, overborne, and crushed by his own superior ignorance.
To be sure, there are men of social culture who gallantly and conspicuously maintain an all-round superiority in the society to which I myself hereditarily belong, namely, the Lower Orders; but their appearances are like angels’ visits—in the obvious, as well as in the conventional but remoter sense. I can count no less than three men of this stamp among my ten thousand acquaintances. When the twofold excellence of such ambidexters is not stultified by selfishness, you have in them a realised ideal upon which their Creator might pronounce the judgment that it is very good. Move heaven and earth, then, to multiply that ideal by the number of the population. The thing is, at least, theoretically possible; for it is in no way necessary that the manual worker should be rude and illiterate; shut out from his rightful heirship of all the ages. Nor is it any more necessary that the social aristocrat—ostentatiously useless, as he generally is—should hold virtual monopoly of the elegancies of life.
But the commonplace ‘gentleman’ of fiction, who, without extraneous advantage, and by mere virtue of caste-consciousness, and caste-eminence, and caste-exclusiveness, doth bestride this narrow world like a colossus
“I am sorry to break in upon your meditations, Collins,” said Willoughby deprecatingly, turning towards me on his elbow, “but you know, Necessitas non habet leges. I find myself without the requisite for my normal bedtime solace; and I am unusually wakeful. Could you spare me a pipeful of tobacco?”
“Certainly! Why didn’t you mention it before? I had no idea you were a smoker. I feel really vexed at your reticence.”
“Well, Mr. Thompson kindly lent me a supply this morning; but, unfortunately, I had a hole in my pocket that I was not aware of, and Thanks. I’ll just take a pipeful”
“No, no; shove it in your pocket. I’ve got more in my swag. Been long in these colonies, Willoughby?”
