First and Last by Hilaire Belloc

think, no more than that he came at a particular moment when any man doing great quantities of detailed work in this field was bound to stand out exaggeratedly. The society in which he appeared had, until just before his day, accepted a narrow cosmogony, quite unknown to its ancestors. Darwin's book certainly exploded that, and the mind of his time--ignorant as it was of the past--was ready to accept the shattering of its father's idols as a new revelation."
    "But you were saying," said I, when he had thus dealt harshly with a great name, "that not the material but the moral changes of your time seemed to you the greatest. Which did you mean?"
    "Why, in the first place," said the old man thoughtfully and with some hesitation, "the curiously rapid decline of intelligence, or if you will have it differently, the clouding of thought that has marked the last thirty years. Men in my youth knew what they held and what they did not hold. They knew why they held it or why they did not hold it; but the attempt to enjoy the advantages of two contradictory systems at the same time, and, what is worse, the consulting of a man as an authority upon subjects he had never professed to know, are intellectual phenomena quite peculiar to the later years of my life."
    I said we of the younger generation had all noticed it, as, for instance, when an honest but imperfectly intelligent chemist was listened to in his exposition of the nature of the soul, or a well-paid religious official was content to expound the consolations of Christianity while denying that Christianity was true.
    "But," I continued, "we are usually told that this unfortunate decline in the express powers of the brain is due to the wide and imperfect education of the populace at the present moment."
    "That is not the case," answered the old man sharply, when I had made myself clear by repeating my remarks in a louder tone, for he was a little deaf.
    "That is not the case. The follies of which I speak are not particularly to be discovered among the poorer classes who have passed through the elementary schools. These " (it was to the schools that he was alluding with a comprehensive pessimism) "may account for the gross decline apparent in the public manners of our people, but not for faults which are peculiar to the upper and middle classes. It is not in the populace, but in those wealthier ranks that you will find the sort of intellectual decay of which I spoke."
    I asked him whether he thought the tricks it was now considered cultured to play with mathematics came within the category of this intellectual decay. The old gentleman answered me a little abruptly that he could not judge what I was talking about.
    "Why," said I, "do you believe that parallel straight lines converge or diverge ?"
    "Neither," said he, a little bewildered. "If they are parallel they cannot by definition either diverge or converge."
    "You are, then," said I, "an old-fashioned adherent of the theory of the parabolic universe?" At which sensible reply of mine the old man muttered rather ill-temperedly, and begged me to speak of something else.
    I asked him whether the knowledge of languages had not declined in his time. He said, somewhat emphatically, yes, and especially the knowledge of French, assuring me that in his early years many a Fellow of a College at Oxford or at Cambridge was capable of speaking that tongue in such a fashion as to make himself understood. On the other hand, he admitted that German and Spanish were more widely known than they had been, and Arabic certainly far more widely diffused among those officials of the Empire who took their work seriously.
    When I asked him whether politics were more corrupt as time proceeded, he said No, but more cynical; and as to morals he would not judge, for he was certain that as one vice was corrected another appeared in its place.
    What he told me he most deplored in the social system of his country was the power of the police and of the