246 Nature Study. [Sess 
education did what all true education should do, organise 
habits of conduct, it would go far to work out Laveleye’s 
ideal. There are few things more depressing in our social 
life than to observe how men spend their leisure. Look at 
the way our trades holidays are largely spent. Take a trip in 
a steamer on the Clyde during the Glasgow Fair Holidays, 
and you will see thousands of hard-working, respectable men 
and women who, when they have a few days’ freedom from 
toil, do not know what to do with themselves. It is much 
the same in all our great cities. “What use will humanity 
make of its leisure?” asks Maeterlinck (‘The Kingdom of 
Matter’). “On its employment may be said to depend the 
whole destiny of man, and were it not well that his counsellors 
should begin to teach him to use such leisure as he has in 
a nobler and worthier fashion? It is the way in which hours 
of freedom are spent that determines as much as war or as 
labour the moral worth of a nation. It raises or lowers, it 
replenishes or exhausts. At present we find in these great 
cities of ours that three days’ idleness will fill the hospitals 
with victims whom weeks or months of toil had left un- 
scathed.” I have quoted this passage—which seems to me 
entirely true—from the distinguished Belgian writer to show 
that the evil is international. 
It is not our working classes alone who do not spend their 
leisure well: look at the literary trash the average English 
traveller brings into a railway carriage to while away an 
hour. JI was once in the desert of Arizona, and there ] 
met an American artist. He had spent a long time in con 
tact with the Red Indians, and, like many men in such places, 
he enjoyed intensely a talk with a stranger. He dilated on 
the Red Indian’s ideal of life, and on that of the white 
American, preferring much that of the Red Indian. In tone 
it was exactly like a conversation with a Red Indian chief 
given by Lotze (‘ Microcosmus,’ ii. 240). “Ah, my brother,” 
said the chieftain to his white guest, “thou wilt never know 
the happiness of both thinking of nothing and of doing 
nothing; this, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all 
things. Thus we were before our birth, and thus we shall be 
after death. . . . Your people are like a fountain flowing from 
the rock,—they never rest. When they have finished reaping 
