THE riG'II'TlNGf FIFTIES 133

Young ladies, artificially kept from all knowledge of the
seamy or even normal side of life, grew up, in tight waists and
voluminous skirts, like flies in amber. The pursuit of wealth
to the exclusion of almost every other worldly object was affect-
ing changes in every department of English life but in none
more than its tendency to rob the English gentlewomen of
useful occupation and of knowledge of the domestic arts and
of the world in which she lived. • The process was gradual and,
so long as large families remained the fashion, tempered by -the
discipline and give-and-take of communal home life. With the
growth of commercial wealth and of the mechanical means of
multiplying comforts and luxuries, its effects became ever more
insidious. For in the end it deprived many women of the upper
and middle class of the natural sources of vitality and strength
and the instinctive feeling for wise and balanced living which,
as mothers, it should have been their lot to transmit to future
generations. More of the ills of our present epoch of reckoning
may be due to this cause than is yet realised.

The strong, imitative instinct and desire to excel of the
English led to a constant approximation of the lower types of
social life to the higher. On a simpler and more spartan scale
the family life of the north-country manufacturer followed
that of the lawyer in Kensington and the banker in Bayswater.
Often he still lived on the premises of his own works in the shade
of the smoke and within earshot of the hammering that created
his wealth. In other cases he had moved out to one of the suburbs
of gardened, gothic villas that were growing up on the outskirts
of places like Manchester and Birmingham. His daily round
and social habits were less leisured than those of the Londoner: he
still went to the mill at six, dined in the middle of the day and
went early to bed after a hot meat supper and family prayers.
Sometimes his working day would last sixteen or more hours.
He sent his sons into the works in their early teens instead of
to-public school and college which, he held, unsettled, the mind
for commercial pursuits.

Though many of those engaged in trade were men of culti-
vation—buyers of pictures and founders of Libraries and Colleges
—the bulk of the provincial merchants tended, like their richer
Forsyte brethren in London, to be Philistines, valuing all
worldly things by the sterling standard, ignoring and despising
art and having little truck with intellect which they left to

E.S. - K