A Mirror

America is probably the best country in which to study the characteristics of the "Leisure Class." For in Europe we have grown used to the correlation of honor with disutility, and time has somewhat confused and mellowed our social relationships. In America the institution is of recent growth, and among the majority of people the idea that a gentleman is one who can afford to live in other people's labour is not yet generally accepted. But in recent years a "leisure class" has begun to emerge, and it exhibits all the usual characteristics. Especially on the Atlantic seaboard, where contact with Europe is continual, the grandchildren of men who made money are already beginning elaborately to forget how it was made, are beginning to employ as much unnecessary labour as possible, because it is expensive, and to change their fashions as often as costumiers can invent new ones, because to wear an obviously different style of dress every few weeks is a conspicuous way of showing that they can afford to waste money. There are other signs with which we are also familiar. No English public school can now compete with some American Universities in their enthusiasm for sport, and they are only following our English lead when they discover moral reasons for sacrificing the upper-class youth of the country to the unit of athletics. Most significant of all, however, is the growth among a small section in some Universities of a leisured attitude to learning. Business America still demands a business education, but the new gentlemanly class, having made the excellent discovery that business is not everything, have begun, by way of reaction, to express contempt for any knowledge which can possibly be of any social utility. Among this class (still a small one) the older kind of "Oxford culture" is therefore the fashion, and, in spite of the fact that America has the finest indigenous architecture in the world and that Gothic is the least suitable style of building for modern domestic purposes, there is now a marked tendency to erect elaborate imitations of England's more famous colleges in American Universities. The assumption appears to be that culture is a kind of moss which grows spontaneously where a suitably medieval building offers the appropriate soil. London Nation.