But as I read of these princely earnings I could not help thinking of what an irrational world this is in the matter of rewards.  Here are a couple of lawyers hurling epithets and “cases” at each other at L100 a day.  At the end a verdict is given for this side or that, and outside the people concerned no one is a penny the better or worse.  And not many miles away hundreds of thousands of men are living in the mud of rat-infested trenches, with the sky raining destruction upon them, and death and mutilation the hourly incident of their lives.  They have no retaining fee and no refresher.  Their reward is a shilling a day, and it would take them 20,000 days to “earn” what one K.C. pockets each night.  Could the mind conceive a more grotesque inversion of the law of services and rewards?  You die for your country at a shilling a day, while at home Snubbin, K.C., is perspiring for his client at L100 a day.

This is old, cheap, and profitless stuff, you say.  What is the good of drawing these contrasts?  We know all about them.  They are a part of the eternal inequality of things.  Services and rewards never have had, and never will have, any relation to each other.  Please do not remind us that Charlie Chaplin (or Charles Chaplin as he desires to be known) earns L130,000 a year by playing the fool in front of a camera, and that Wordsworth did not earn enough to keep himself in shoe-laces out of poetry which has become an immortal possession of humanity, and had to beg a noble nobody (the Earl of Lonsdale, I think) to get him a job as a stamp distributor to keep him in bread and butter.

Do not, my dear sir, be alarmed, I am not going to work that ancient theme off on you.  And yet I think it is necessary sometimes to remind ourselves of these things.  It is especially necessary now when there is so much easy talk about “equality of sacrifice,” and so much easy forgetfulness of the inequality of rewards.  It is useful, too, to remind ourselves that riches have no necessary relation to service.  The genius for getting money is an altogether different thing from the genius for service.  I suppose the Guinnesses (to take an example) are the richest people in Ireland.  And I suppose Tom Kettle was one of the poorest.  But who will dare apply the money test as the real measure of the values of these men to humanity—­the one fabulously rich by brewing the “black stuff,” as they call it in Ireland; the other glorious in his genius for spending himself, without a thought of return, on every noble cause and dying freely for liberty in the full tide of his powers?  Which means the more to the world?  Perhaps one effect of the war will be to give us a saner standard of values in these things—­will teach us to look behind the money and title to the motives that get the money and the title.  It is not the money and title we should distrust so much as the false implications attaching to them.