The Heir of all Ages.  His Inheritance.

In similar manner he, the Celestial Observer, proceeds to describe our billiard matches, our tennis tournaments, our croquet parties.  Maybe it never occurs to him that a large section of our race surrounded by Eternity, would devote its entire span of life to sheer killing of time.  A middle-aged friend of mine, a cultured gentleman, a M.A. of Cambridge, assured me the other day that, notwithstanding all his experiences of life, the thing that still gave him the greatest satisfaction was the accomplishment of a successful drive to leg.  Rather a quaint commentary on our civilization, is it not?  “The singers have sung, and the builders have builded.  The artists have fashioned their dreams of delight.”  The martyrs for thought and freedom have died their death; knowledge has sprung from the bones of ignorance; civilization for ten thousand years has battled with brutality to this result—that a specimen gentleman of the Twentieth Century, the heir of all the ages, finds his greatest joy in life the striking of a ball with a chunk of wood!

Human energy, human suffering, has been wasted.  Such crown of happiness for a man might surely have been obtained earlier and at less cost.  Was it intended?  Are we on the right track?  The child’s play is wiser.  The battered doll is a princess.  Within the sand castle dwells an ogre.  It is with imagination that he plays.  His games have some relation to life.  It is the man only who is content with this everlasting knocking about of a ball.  The majority of mankind is doomed to labour so constant, so exhausting, that no opportunity is given it to cultivate its brain.  Civilization has arranged that a small privileged minority shall alone enjoy that leisure necessary to the development of thought.  And what is the answer of this leisured class?  It is:

“We will do nothing for the world that feeds us, clothes us, keeps us in luxury.  We will spend our whole existence knocking balls about, watching other people knocking balls about, arguing with one another as to the best means of knocking balls about.”