are for the most part mental miseries, the feeling of shabbiness as one sees the ugly yawn, for example, between toe cap and the main upper of the boot; but they involve also chills, colds, and a long string of disagreeable consequences. And we spoke too of the misery of sitting down to work (as multitudes of London school children do every wet morning) in boots with soles worn thin or into actual holes, that have got wet and chilling on the way to the work-place....
From these instances my mind ran on to others. I made a discovery. I had always despised the common run of poor Londoners for not spending their Sundays and holidays in sturdy walks, the very best of exercise. I had allowed myself to say when I found myself one summer day at Margate: “What a soft lot all these young people must be who loaf about the band-stand here, when they might be tramping over the Kentish hills inland!” But now I repented me of that. Long tramps indeed! Their boots would have hurt them. Their boots would not stand it. I saw it all.
And now my discourse was fairly under way. “Ex pede Herculem,” I said; “these miseries of boots are no more than a sample. The clothes people wear are no better than their boots; and the houses they live in far worse. And think of the shoddy garment of ideas and misconceptions and partial statements into which their poor minds have been jammed by way of education! Think of the way that pinches and chafes them! If one expanded the miseries of these things.... Think, for example, of the results of the poor, bad, unwise food, of badly-managed eyes and ears and teeth! Think of the quantity of toothache.”
“I tell you, it does not do to think of such things!” cried my friend, in a sort of anguish; and would have no more of it at any price....
And yet in his time he had written books full of these very matters, before despair overtook him.
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