Snobbishness is one of the causes which lead to the Eighth Year, and not the least among them. It is an essentially middle-class snobbishness, and has grown up, like a fungus growth, with that immense and increasing class of small, fairly well-to-do households who have come into being with the advance of material prosperity during the past twenty-five years, and with the progress of elementary education, and all that it has brought with it in the form of new desires for pleasure, amusement and more luxuries. These young husbands and wives who set up their little homes are not, as I have said, content to start on the same level as their parents in the first years of their married life. They must start at least on the level of their parents at the end of their married life, even a little in advance. The seeds of snobbishness are sown before marriage. The modern son pooh-poohs the habits of his old-fashioned father. They are not good enough for him. He has at least twice the pocket-money at school compared with the allowance of his father when he was a boy. He goes to a more expensive school and learns expensive habits. When he begins work he does not hand over most of his salary as his father used to hand over his salary a generation ago, to keep the family pot boiling. He keeps all that he earns, though he is still living at home, and develops a nice taste in clothes. One tie on week-days and another tie for Sundays are still good enough for the father, but the son buys ties by the dozen, and then has a passion for fancy socks, and lets his imagination rove into all departments of haberdashery. He is only a middle-class young man, but he dresses in the style of a man of fashion, adopts some of the pleasures of the man about town, and is rather scornful of the little house in the suburbs to which he returns after a bachelor’s dinner in a smart restaurant, or after a tea-party with gaiety girls. He becomes a “Nut,” and his evenings are devoted to a variety of amusements, which does away with a good deal of money. He smokes a special brand of cigarettes. He hires a motor-car occasionally for a spin down to Brighton. His mother and father are rather scared by this son who lives in a style utterly beyond their means.

The girl is a feminine type of the new style. She has adopted the new notions. At a very early age she is expert in all the arts of the younger generation, and at seventeen or eighteen has already revolted from the authority of her parents. She is quite a nice girl, naturally, but her chief vice is vanity. She is eaten up with it. It is a consuming passion. From the moment she gets out of bed in the morning for the first glimpse of her face in the looking-glass to the time she goes to bed after putting on some lip-salve and face enamel, she is absorbed with self-consciousness about her “looks.” Her face is always occupying her attention. Even in railway trains she keeps biting her lips to make them red. At every window she passes she gives a sidelong glance to see if her face is getting on all right. Her main ambition in life is to be in the fashion. She is greedy for “pretty things” and sponges upon her father and mother for the wherewithal to buy them, and she will not lay a little finger on any work in the kitchen or even make a bed, lest her hands should be roughened and because it would not be quite “lady-like.”

A pretty education for matrimony! A nice couple to set up house together Poor children of life, they are doomed to have a pack of troubles. Because as they began they go on, with the same ideas, with the same habits of mind, until they get a rude shock. Their little household is a shrine to the great god Snob. They are his worshippers. To make a show beyond their meansj or up to the very limit of their means, to pretend to be better off than they are, to hide any sign of poverty, to dress above their rank in life, to show themselves in places of entertainment, to shirk domestic drudgery, that is their creed.

In the old days, before the problem of the Eighth Year had arrived, the wives of men, the mothers of those very girls, kept themselves busy by hundreds of small duties. They made the beds, dusted the rooms, helped the servants in the kitchen, made a good many of their own clothes, mended them, altered them, cleaned the silver. But nowadays the wife of the professional man does none of these things if there is any escape from them. She keeps one servant at a time when her mother did without a servant. She keeps two servants as soon as her husband can afford an extra one, three servants if the house is large enough to hold them. Indeed, a rise in the social scale is immediately the excuse for an additional servant, and in the social status the exact financial prosperity of the middle-classes is reckoned by them according to the number of servants they keep. And whether it be two or three, the little snob wife sits in her drawing-room with idle hands, trying to kill time, getting tired of doing nothing, but proud of her laziness. And the snob husband encourages her in her laziness. He is proud of it, too. He would hate to think of his wife dusting, or cleaning, or washing up. He does not guess that this worship of his great god Snob is a devil’s worship, having devilish results for himself and her. The idea that women want work never enters his head. His whole ambition in life is to prevent his wife from working, not only when he is alive, but after he is dead. He insures himself heavily and at the cost of a great financial strain upon his resources in order that “if anything happens” his wife, even then, need not raise her little finger to do any work. But something “happens” before he is dead. The woman revolts from the evil spell of her laziness. She finds some work for her idle hands to do—good work or bad.