And his son was England's richest commoner.
It was the dawn of the day of common richness.
The new aristocracy was as hospitably large as the old
aristocracy had been sternly small. Before Wyatt, leisure had
been the thinnest of exhalations along the very top of society.
Since Wyatt, it has got diffused in greater and greater density
through at least the upper third of it. And for all that magical
extension of free time, wrested from the ceaseless toil with
which God cursed Adam, we stand indebted (and so recently!) to
the machinery SET going by that spontaneous explosion of artisan
genius in England only a hundred and fifty years ago, KEPT going
(and faster and faster) by the labor of men, women, and children
behind factory windows, the world over, to-day.
Marie's view of the situation, however, is the usual one. We are
billions of miles from really realizing that leisure is produced
by somebody's work, that just "Being a Good Woman" or "Being a
Decent Fellow" is so far from being an adequate return for the
toil of other people that it is just exactly no return at all. We
are billions of miles from admitting that the virtuous parasite
is just as much a parasite as the vicious parasite:--that the
former differs from the latter in the use of the money but not at
all in the matter of getting it in return for nothing.
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