Good,
perhaps, if it be that the time for the old "veast" has gone by; that
it is no longer the healthy, sound expression of English country
holiday-making; that, in fact, we, as a nation, have got beyond it,
and are in a transition state, feeling for and soon likely to find some
better substitute.
Only I have just got this to say before I quit the text. Don't let
reformers of any sort think that they are going really to lay hold of
the working boys and young men of England by any educational grapnel
whatever, which isn't some bona fide equivalent for the games of the
old country "veast" in it; something to put in the place of the
back-swording and wrestling and racing; something to try the muscles
of men's bodies, and the endurance of their hearts, and to make them
rejoice in their strength. In all the new-fangled comprehensive plans
which I see, this is all left out; and the consequence is, that your
great mechanics' institutes end in intellectual priggism, and your
Christian young men's societies in religious Pharisaism.
Well, well, we must bide our time. Life isn't all beer and skittles;
but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form
a good part of every Englishman's education. If I could only drive this
into the heads of you rising parliamentary lords, and young swells
who "have your ways made for you," as the saying is, you, who frequent
palaver houses and West-end clubs, waiting always ready to strap
yourselves on to the back of poor dear old John, as soon as the present
used-up lot (your fathers and uncles), who sit there on the great
parliamentary-majorities' pack-saddle, and make believe they're guiding
him with their red-tape bridle, tumble, or have to be lifted off!
I don't think much of you yet--I wish I could--though you do go talking
and lecturing up and down the country to crowded audiences, and are
busy with all sorts of philanthropic intellectualism, and circulating
libraries and museums, and Heaven only knows what besides, and try to
make us think, through newspaper reports, that you are, even as we, of
the working classes.
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