During the years which, roughly speaking, divide the past which Mrs. Gell applauds from the present which she deplores, a large measure of Legislation was passed, such as the extensions of the Factory Acts, and the Shop Hours Act, which, by limiting the hours during which the worker might be kept at work, resulted in games being no longer a class privilege. The words of Mr. Asquith as late as 1906 may be recalled: "Behind and underneath the surface of society there are sights terrible, appalling, and yet inspiring for those who have eyes to see. The labourer who tills the fields season after season in patient industry, with no home for his old age beyond the precarious bounty of public or private charity; the work-girl, old before her time, who lives a life worse than that of a mediaeval serf in the squalor of the sweater's den-these are the figures which, if we would only recognize it, are more appalling to the imagination, and more stirring to the sense of wrong, than any vision that ever inspired Crusader or knight-errant." Clearly these cannot be the conditions to which Mrs. Gell would have us return, when no Old Age Pensions Act existed which enables the labourer of to-day to devote a shilling to watching a football match without feeling that he will need it for bread when he is sixty-five, and no legislation ensured the work-girl an hour or two a week for "play" ?

Much time and thought have been expended of late years by high-minded and sensible people in providing sports grounds for the workers and arranging games for them, in the sure belief that by so doing they are improving the health of the nation, inculcating a spirit of comradeship and fair play, and keeping the young boys out of mischief during their spare time. The richest of the Oxford Colleges (while the present writer was at the University) set the fashion in allowing the poorest boys of the town to make use of its magnificent playing field (under proper supervision) when the undergraduates were not using it. Was this action likely to encourage the Dragon of Bolshevism, which, according to Mrs. Gell, stalks upon us while we are at play? Games, by providing a mutual subject of interest, and a field in which Gentleman and Player meet on a footing of mutual respect, do more than anything else to bring classes together, as anyone who has chatted through a summer afternoon with his companions in the shilling seats at the Oval can testify from his heart.

Mrs. Gell is of the opinion that a part, at any rate, of such time as the lower classes can afford for recreation would be better employed in some constructive occupation, such as

gardening or carpentry or building. With this one may be in general agreement (where funds are forthcoming to provide materials or ground for gardening purposes), but at a time like the present, when unemployment is the acutest of all problems, it may be asked whether it is desirable or just for amateur workers to do for nothing work which, if done by professionals, would provide a living wage? What, in fact, would be the result if such actions became general? In cases where boys were employed in leisure hours on tasks similar to those of their trade, the recreation" would resolve itself into overtime work without remuneration.

66

In the case of what are called the Middle Classes there are also more opportunities for games than formerly. It should be noted that the " player of whom Mrs. Gell approves, "the big-game hunter, the crack shot, the expert fisherman, the spirited polo-player," must of necessity be a man of means-in fact, must be one of the privileged few of the former era. Though the clerk or shopkeeper of to-day has some leisure for recreation, he cannot, however high-spirited, conceivably afford to indulge in hunting or playing polo. Possibly, in some Utopian democracy of the future, legislation will be passed or economic conditions will exist which will enable him to do so. For the present he must content himself with reviving his health and spirits after his indoor, sedentary, week's work by taking the exercise which is natural to man in the open air which is his natural element. A tennis court and a golf links, where, on green turf, opponents strive for victory, take men nearer to the natural condition from which an over-elaborated civilization has driven them than the counters of Hammersmith Broadway or the office stools of Paternoster Row. This Mrs. Gell would grant, but she would have preferred the time spent on these games to be devoted to gardening. The answer is that the small householder is already famous for his devotion to his garden. For this reason he is perpetually moving farther and farther into the suburbs, where garden cities are springing up continually, and each householder takes a pride in keeping his garden up to the general high standard. That same householder in the Victorian era would have been lucky if he had been able to afford one of those small brick villas, built in a row, with a backyard in place of a garden, which were the peculiar architectural glory of that utilitarian age.

The middle-class father is also often able nowadays to run a small motor, in which at week-ends he can take his family into the country, and even to the seaside. The motor

in this way is one of the strongest factors in promoting and preserving the family life in which Mrs. Gell so rightly glories. Let her picture what would be the effect in a typical middle-class family if the father were suddenly to adopt her views, to refuse to motor the children into the country on Saturday for fear of overtiring them in an illegitimate way, to forbid his son and daughter to play tennis or golf at the week-end, and to insist that they should build a toolshed. A toolshed built in those circumstances would do as much to promote harmony in a family as the erection of the Tower of Babel.

Further, with regard to the family motor, the knowledge which boys and girls have of the interior of a car or of a motor-cycle is extraordinary, and is quite as useful to them in their generation as the knowledge of woodcraft was to their forefathers.

66

It is, however, at the so-called "leisured class" that Mrs. Gell's real indictment is levelled. She complains that our manhood in too many cases regards its profession (if it has any) merely as a means to provide the amusement which is absolutely essential." The irony of the bracket "if it has any "could hardly be exceeded. Public-school

men, more and more of whom have to support themselves at the earliest opportunity, and who are falling over one another in desperation to try to secure a suitable "job" in a land of increasingly restricted opportunities, are thus taunted with being too cynically supine to trouble themselves with work. In point of fact, it is noteworthy that in Public Schools since the war the class of boy who "knows he will never have to work" has practically died out. Even at the schools which in the past catered for the "idle rich," almost every boy is intending to take up a career of some kind when his education is finished. Since the war a stigma has come to be attached to anyone who "doesn't do anything," and a sense of false pride no longer deters Public-school boys from resorting to types of work of which formerly they would have been ashamed. Rather than be without work they have (to the knowledge of the present writer) become policemen, working engineers, salesmen, tailors, or watchmakers, and recently the head master of one of our oldest Public Schools, where the pre-eminent record of classical scholarships is still maintained, urged his boys not to hesitate if necessary to start in any line of real work on the bottom rung of the ladder, and told them that a Public-School boy would make a no worse, and perhaps a better, railway director for having started his career by punching tickets.

Speaking from personal experience of a very large number of young "old boys," the writer knows it to be an exception if one of these young men does not devote an evening or more a week to Boy Scouts or to Working-men's Clubs, or to political work, or to some serious artistic pursuit which could not be adopted as a profession owing to lack of funds. Over and over again we are told that "So-and-so does not dance because he is working too hard to be up so late," or that he limits his dancing to one evening a week.

66

Who are the men who endured the strain of the greatest war in history, and for years dwelt in the valley of the shadow of death, that they should be accused of frivolity? Sir Walter Raleigh, in the official history of the Air Force, wrote: Critics who speak of what they have not felt, and do not know, have sometimes blamed the Air Service because, being young, it has not the decorum of age. The Latin poet said that it is decorous to die for one's country; in that decorum the Service is perfectly instructed." There are many whose excuse for playing tennis to-day must be that it so happened that they were not called upon to do the decorous thing, but that for a number of years they were prepared to do it, and might at least expect to escape the contempt of the countrymen to whom they return. The Duke of Wellington was no despiser of games when he gave his famous explanation of the victory at Waterloo; so of the Great War it might be claimed that it was won not only upon the playing fields of Eton and Harrow, but on those of every county school in the country, where eyes have been kept keen and muscles hard and brains clear to be ready for the day of the testing of nations.

66

Who again are the boys who worked with the utmost energy and enterprise to defeat the General Strike that they should be accused of weakness? Did they not show themselves capable of doing any work which came to their hand cheerfully and willingly and competently-in some cases more competently than the men who were accustomed to do it? Nothing was more salutary in the Great Strike," writes Mrs. Gell," than the knowledge it brought to thousands of gallant young Englishmen of what manual labour really means. "Nothing should have been more salutary in the Great Strike," the young Englishmen (with no wish to be thought "gallant ") might have retorted, "than the demonstration that it gave to our critics that we can do manual labour, when necessary, and, when for the time it becomes our business, quite as well as it could have been done by the young men of the past who are said to have had no illusion as to what is the serious business of life."

With regard to the much-discussed "modern girl," the thing for which she yearns most is work. She wants to earn her own living, to be of use in the world, to have a profession, or even a career, not to be merely a toy or a burden. It is lamented by some that thousands of well-to-do girls are not content nowadays to live at home-but what is their reason for going away? Not games, certainly, for they could get their games better and more cheaply and more pleasantly if they stayed at home. It is the natural craving for an independent existence, and in this generation it is expressing itself in the desire for work. Some people have tried to tell the modern girl that her work lies at home, and have pointed out the many little duties and kindnesses which will have to be left undone if she goes away. But she asks: "If these things are so necessary, why do you not engage someone else to do them? Is the world any the worse for their being left undone? My employer would have to engage a new secretary if I were to leave, so I know I am really being of use. Besides, if I were to marry, home would be prepared to do without me, therefore why should home not be equally prepared when I go away to take up some other career? She may be wrong: home may be the poorer for her new point of view: but in any case she cannot be accused of frittering away her life in play, when she has exchanged an existence of comfort, even of luxury, whose duties were almost indistinguishable from pleasures, for the strenuous round of the business girl." If these girls are held back from work and encouraged to play, it is the doing of the elder generation, to whom a tennis party was a social "duty"; and of course they play too, at the week-ends when their work is done, as keenly and as well as they work: the same enthusiasm and new-found ability help them to do both.

66

Then, when they marry, how different are their circumstances from those of their grandmothers. Again and again one hears of girls from the highest class of society doing their own housework, or a large part of it, managing their babies without a nurse, driving and cleaning the car, cooking and washing and sewing, and thankful they learnt "domestic economy "before they married. Yet one sees them at a dance or a wedding, as smartly turned out as ever, and one would not guess that supper was laid on the kitchen table because the maid was out, or that they were a little late because they could not start until the baby had gone off to sleep. Are they to be blamed for a Sunday's tennis with the equally hard-working husband who provides the funds for the marriage to take place and the babies to be brought into