at any of the half-dozen “smartest” restaurants in London, pay a couple of pounds for your meal, and be sure that a French commercial traveller, bred to the old standards of the provincial ordinary, would have sent for the cook and given him a scolding.  It is not to be supposed that the most expensive English restaurants fail to engage the most expensive French chefs; they are engaged, but they soon fall below the mark because there is no one to keep them up to it.  The clients have no standards.  Go to the opera and look at the rich ladies’ frocks:  they might have come out of an antimacassar factory.  They express no sense of what is personally becoming nor a sense of insolent luxury even:  they bear witness to an utter lack of standards, and they cost a great deal of money.  The best is good enough for these fine ladies, and their best is the dressmaker’s most expensive.

This is no mere question of fashions and conventions.  If standards go, civilization goes.  To hear people talk you might suppose there had never been such things as dark ages.  Not only have there been dark ages, there has been an unmeasured tract of pre-historic savagery, and sharp eyes—­notably those of Louis Weber—­are beginning to detect certain similarities between this age and that.  The peculiarity of the historic age, man’s brilliant age, the age of civilization, is the conservatism of its technique and its spiritual restlessness.  In the pre-historic age man’s best energies were apparently devoted to perfecting the means to material existence.  Improving the instrument was the grand preoccupation.  From the old stone age to the new, from that to bronze, and from bronze to iron is the story of pre-historic development.  Then follow some forty centuries during which man rests content with his instrument.  Between the Minoan age and the Industrial Revolution his technical discoveries are insignificant by comparison with his spiritual adventures.  Content with the plough, the wagon, and the loom, man turns the sharp edge of his mind to things of the mind, considers himself in all his relations, thinks, feels, states, expresses, concerns himself with spiritual, rather than material, problems.  With the Industrial Revolution begins the third act.  Again human intelligence and ingenuity concentrate on the prehistoric problem—­the perfecting of the instrument.  For a hundred years Europe marches merrily back towards barbarism.  Then, at the very moment when she is becoming alarmed and self-critical, at the very moment when she is wondering how she is to reconcile her new material ambitions with the renascent claims of the spirit, comes a war that relegates to the dust-bin or the gaol all that is not of immediate practical utility.  The smoke of battle drifts slowly away and reveals a situation almost hopeless.  We have lost our standards, our taste in life:  we have lost the very thing by which we recognized that there were such things as spiritual values.