ginger being no longer hot in a mouth that has lost all savours, they will become aged devotees and perhaps make for edification.
No doubt to the passionate reformer, of whatever code, the idea of so many individuals living the life of beasts is horribly disturbing. (I know, indeed, one reformer who was driven to fits of rage at the waste of time in a family of the leisured class. They had lived at this particular reformer's house in the country, and apparently washed themselves ten times a day.) But no doubt, too, this phenomenon makes for good to the body politic.
Work is the original curse of mankind because it is the original medicine. We may go on working till we drop, occupying our minds, keeping our bodies sound—but the moment we drop work our minds decay, our bodies atrophy, it is all over with us in this world. As with individuals so with the Body Politic, or with London, the modern World Town.
Whilst, in essentials, it is a Town of Work it keeps all on going; it sweats out at the top these atrophied individuals, or it sweats them out at the bottom (they hang around the street posts and make books outside the doors of public houses); and thus Work, the medicine, purges the unhealthy corpuscles of the blood or revenges itself of the too healthy. For if we may call the poor loafer the unhealthy, we must call the rich leisured class the too healthy. In one way or another their ancestors, their family, their gens, have worked too much for them: they are left without the need to
118
