6io PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
extravagances of American life was a contemporary Western Weltan-
schauung that was shared with North America by Western Europe. The
United States at this time was, in fact, performing the salutary service of
an automatic confessional for the Western World at large. She was
serving as a convex mirror in which any Western observer, from either
side of the Atlantic, could become acquainted with some of his own
spiritual deformities by beholding them here revealingly magnified.
It was, in truth, no mere accidental coincidence that the current
symptoms of cultural proletarianization in the life of a Western middle
class in the United States should have been contemporaneous with the
raising, in the same country, of a Western industrial working class's
material standard of life to what was virtually a middle-class level. One
of the elements in a higher material standard of living was, as we have
seen, a larger ration of leisure. This increase of leisure was simultaneously
being bestowed upon the industrial working class in Western Europe as
one consequence of a radical revision of rates of wages and hours of
work; and it was only to be expected that the progress towards social
justice that was thus now being made in the Western World as a whole,
along a West European as well as a North American line of approach,
should have the, at first sight, paradoxical immediate effect of preci-
pitating a fall in the mean level of Western culture.
This undesirable effect was to be expected in the first instance, not
because Leisure was now still being bestowed, as it had always been,
without regard to the recipient's capacity or incapacity for making use of
it, but because it had also always taken even the choicest spirits time to
learn how to make good use of any new gift. The pearls that were now
being redistributed among a majority instead of remaining the monopoly
of a minority were not being taken away from a minority consisting ex-
clusively of connoisseurs in order to be cast before a majority consisting
exclusively of swine who knew no better than to trample these precious
offerings under their feet.1 The misuse of Leisure by a majority of its
possessors was, notoriously, no new thing. In the days when Leisure
had been a monopoly of a minority, a majority of that minority had
always misused it, as we have already observed.2 Only a minority of that
minority had made the creative use of Leisure that had been the main-
spring of Civilization. The reason why, nevertheless, a redistribution of
Leisure was likely to result in a lowering of the level of culture was that
even the creative minority of a leisured minority had needed time to
mature. The inestimably precious spiritual treasures that this minority
had eventually created had been ripe fruits of self-education and self-
discipline,3 and these had been the cumulative spiritual achievement of
a series of consecutive generations. This was the secret of cultural
creativity; and it was something that could not be transmitted by print-
* Matt. vii. 6.	a On p. 604, above.
3 The importance of the part that had heen played by self-discipline in the creation
of & Western Christian culture was indicated in the history of the word 'clerk', which,
before its meaning had been depreciated to signify a worker who worked in an office and
not tn a factory, had once signified a possessor and trustee of culture, and had stood for
this because, in Western Christendom, the original possessors and trustees of culture
had been the clergy and, among them, above all, a disciplined minority that was enrolled
in. the monastic orders.