Subject: "high tea" given last winter b

From: Chere <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2009 15:40:57 +0200

Elf--have been to blame? It lifts a load from us, fixing the blame on
Society. There were periods in the play when we hardly knew what to
think. The scientific father, the dead mother, the early husband! it was
difficult to grasp the fact that they alone were to blame. One felt
there was something to be said for even them. Ugly thoughts would cross
our mind that perhaps the Heroine herself was not altogether
irreproachable--that possibly there would have been less Problem, if,
thinking a little less about her clothes, yearning a little less to do
nothing all day long and be perfectly happy, she had pulled herself
together, told herself that the world was not built exclusively for her,
and settled down to the existence of an ordinary decent woman. Looking
at the thing all round, that is perhaps the best solution of the
Problem: it is Society that is to blame. We had better keep to that.
CHAPTER IX Civilization and the Unemployed. Where Civilization fails is
in not providing men and women with sufficient work. In the Stone Age
man was, one imagines, kept busy. When he was not looking for his
dinner, or eating his dinner, or sleeping off the effects of his dinner,
he was hard at work with a club, clearing the neighbourhood of what one
doubts not he would have described as aliens. The healthy Palaeolithic
man would have had a contempt for Cobden rivalling that of Mr.
Chamberlain himself. He did not take the incursion of the foreigner
"lying down." One pictures him in the mind's eye: unscientific, perhaps,
but active to a degree difficult to