Music and the Savage.

I never visit a music-hall without reflecting concerning the great future there must be before the human race.

How young we are, how very young!  And think of all we have done!  Man is still a mere boy.  He has only just within the last half-century been put into trousers.  Two thousand years ago he wore long clothes—the Grecian robe, the Roman toga.  Then followed the Little Lord Fauntleroy period, when he went about dressed in a velvet suit with lace collar and cuffs, and had his hair curled for him.  The late lamented Queen Victoria put him into trousers.  What a wonderful little man he will be when he is grown up!

A clergyman friend of mine told me of a German Kurhaus to which he was sent for his sins and his health.  It was a resort, for some reason, specially patronized by the more elderly section of the higher English middle class.  Bishops were there, suffering from fatty degeneration of the heart caused by too close application to study; ancient spinsters of good family subject to spasms; gouty retired generals.  Can anybody tell me how many men in the British Army go to a general?  Somebody once assured me it was five thousand, but that is absurd, on the face of it.  The British Army, in that case, would have to be counted by millions.  There are a goodish few American colonels still knocking about.  The American colonel is still to be met with here and there by the curious traveller, but compared with the retired British general he is an extinct species.  In Cheltenham and Brighton and other favoured towns there are streets of nothing but retired British generals—squares of retired British generals—whole crescents of British generals.  Abroad there are pensions with a special scale of charges for British generals.  In Switzerland there has even been talk of reserving railway compartments “For British Generals Only.”  In Germany, when you do not say distinctly and emphatically on being introduced that you are not a British general, you are assumed, as a matter of course, to be a British general.  During the Boer War, when I was residing in a small garrison town on the Rhine, German military men would draw me aside and ask of me my own private personal views as to the conduct of the campaign.  I would give them my views freely, explain to them how I would finish the whole thing in a week.

“But how in the face of the enemy’s tactics—” one of them would begin.

“Bother the enemy’s tactics,” I would reply.  “Who cares for tactics?”

“But surely a British general—” they would persist.  “Who’s a British general?” I would retort, “I am talking to you merely as a plain commonsense man, with a head on my shoulders.”

They would apologize for their mistake.  But this is leading me away from that German Kurhaus.