Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/301

 The real social deterioration accrues when the well-born or well-educated man becomes fatally contented with his humble surroundings; when hope has faded out, when ambition is dead, when repeated trials have landed him in deeper failure; when the conviction is only too well founded that for him no higher position is attainable in this world. Nay, that even if attained, he is no longer fitted to occupy it.

Persons imperfectly acquainted with our social system may say, 'Oh, once a gentleman, always a gentleman!' and so on. From whatever rude environment, he will come forth true to his training, and assume his earlier habitudes as easily as the well-fitting garments which his altered circumstances render necessary.

It is not so, unfortunately. Granted that the exceptional individual emerges from the wreck of his youthful aspirations safe and uninjured, more numerous are they tenfold who reach the shore bleeding and disabled, never to be again but the simulacra of their former selves—hopeless of ever attaining the fair heaven-crowned heights, so near, so tempting of ascent in boyhood; heedless but of the lower pains and pleasures to which they have all unresistingly yielded their future lives.

Much of course depends on the mental fibre of the youngster. If happily constituted, he may defy the most inauspicious surroundings to alter his habits of thought or change his settled purpose in life. One boy, at the roughest station in the 'back blocks,' will save his money and do his work in a cheerfully observant spirit; he will utilise the spare time, of which he has so large a supply, in reading and improving his mind; he will find out all he can about the working of the station, with a view to future operations when he is promoted to partnership or management. To this he resolutely looks forward. He preserves the manners and the principles which he brought from home untarnished; an easy enough matter, since even in the farthest wilds, among the roughest working men in Australia, a true gentleman's mien and tone are always held in respect, which no man loses save by his own act.

Say that he has a few years of hard work and privation, he is sure to rise in life, and eventually, by dint of perseverance and attention to detail, to become the owner of or