SHROPSHIRE AND JACK MYTTON 173 



Here was a man whose qualities both of mind and body 

 might have rendered him a good citizen, a happy man, and a 

 cause of happiness to all around him, but whose nature was 

 perverted by bad education and a wholly vicious environment. 

 And such examples come before us continuously, exciting 

 little attention and no serious thought. A few years back we 

 had the champion plunger, who got rid of near a million in a 

 very short time; and within the last few years we have had 

 in the bankruptcy court a young nobleman of historic lineage 

 and great estates ; also, a youth just come into a fortune of 

 £12,000, who, while an undergraduate at Oxford, gave £5000 

 for four race-horses, which he had never seen, on the word of 

 the seller about whom he knew nothing, spent over a thousand 

 in training them, and in another year or two had got rid of 

 the last of his thousands besides incurring a considerable 

 amount of debt. But nobody seems to think that the great 

 number of such cases always occurring, and which are 

 probably increasing with the increasing numbers of great 

 fortunes, really indicates a thoroughly rotten social system. 



How often we hear the remark upon such cases, " He is 

 nobody's enemy but his own." But this is totally untrue, 

 and every such spendthrift is really a worse enemy of society 

 than the professional burglar, because he lives in the midst 

 of an ever-widening circle of parasites and dependents, whose 

 idleness, vice, and profligacy are the direct creation of his 

 misspent wealth. He is not only vicious himself, but he is a 

 cause of vice in others. Perhaps worse even than the vice is 

 the fact that among his host of dependents are many quite 

 honest people, who live by the salaries they receive from him 

 or the dealings they have with him, and the self-interest of 

 these leads them to look leniently upon the whole system 

 which gives them a livelihood. Innumerable vested interests 

 thus grow up around all such great estates, and the more 

 wastefully the owner spends his income the better it seems to 

 be for all the tradesmen and mechanics in the district. But 

 the fundamental evil is the kind of sanctity we attach to 

 property, however accumulated and however spent. Hence 

 no real reform is ever suggested; and those who go to the 



