MARCH 231 



to imagine the change that would come over civilisation 

 if that most improbable of all miracles were to take place 

 and the majority of people became non-meat-eaters. I 

 have a note from one of Walter Bagehot's books which 

 points out the evil of reduction in luxury. I am not 

 political economist enough to know whether his view is 

 generally accepted now ; it is in contradiction to that 

 of other teachers. He says : ' We must observe, what is 

 incessantly forgotten, that it is not a Spartan and ascetic 

 state of society which most generates saving. On the 

 contrary, if a whole society has few wants there is little 

 motive for saving. . . . Nothing is commoner than to read 

 homilies on luxury. Without the multifarious accumula- 

 tion of wants, which are called luxury, there would in such 

 a state of society be far less saving than there is. And if 

 it be good for the poor that capital should be saved, then 

 the momentary luxury which causes that saving is good 

 for the poor.' I spend in fruit and on the garden what I 

 should have spent under ordinary circumstances in meat 

 and wine, with certainly more enjoyment to myself and, 

 perhaps, less waste. 



My nieces, I believe, look upon me as a kind of witch 

 meant no doubt as a subtle compliment and, now that 

 many are married and have babies, they say they want 

 my opinion on the important question of how to manage 

 them. I am very fond of babies and a great admirer 

 even of large families, now so out of fashion. In a book 

 lately published I read the other day of a bishop at the 

 beginning of this century who wrote to his young married 

 daughter : ' Go on, my dear Eliza, and never fear hurting 

 your constitution by honest child-bearing, since, for one 

 mother that grows thin with this work, there are five 

 hundred old maids that grow thin for want of it.' As a 

 matter of fact, I have seen very little of nurseries of late 

 years, but I never travel in railway carriages with babies, 



