第72章 SPORT, CULTURE ANDCHARITY(5)

This certainly implies some transfusion of moral standards, the union of common sentiments regarding industry and property with the downward spread of a modified conception of a sporting life.Indeed, imitation has gone a certain way towards infecting all the stabler grades of the working-classes with this blend of barbarian and puritan valuations.While the larger pecuniary means and leisure which they possess has introduced into their standard of life sporting habits largely imitative of the fully leisured aristocracy, it has implanted habits of 'respectability' as the contribution of the bourgeois type immediately above them in the social scale.

§6.But when we dip down below the bourgeois and the regular working-classes which he has drilled in industry, we find a lower leisure class whose valuations and ways of living form a most instructive parody of the upper leisure class.Both in country and town life these types appear.They include 'gypsies', tramps, poachers and other vagabonds, who have never been enlisted in the army of industry, or have deserted in favour of a 'free' life of hazard, beggary and plunder.In towns natural proclivities or misfortune account for considerable groups of casual workers, professional or amateur thieves and prostitutes, street-sellers, corner-men, kept husbands, and other parasites who are a burden on the working-classes.Alike in country and in town, these men practise, so far as circumstances allow, the same habits and exhibit the same character as the leisure class at the top.The fighting, sporting, roving, generous, reckless, wasteful traits are all discernible, the same unaffected contempt for the worker, the same class camaraderie, often with a special code of honour, the same sex license and joviality of manners.Even their intelligence and humour, their very modes of speech, are the half-imitative, half-original replica of high life as it shows in the race-course, in the club smoke-room, or the flash music hall.Often the parasites and hangers-on to upper-class sports and recreations, these form a large and growing class of our population, and their withdrawal from all industry that can be termed productive, coupled with the debased mode of consumption which they practise, count heavily in the aggregate of social waste.