THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN
The fatal reservation of the gentleman is that he sacrifices everything to his honor except his gentility.
A gentleman of our days is one who has money enough to do what every fool would do if he could afford it: that is, consume without producing.
The true diagnostic of modern gentility is parasitism.
No elaboration of physical or moral accomplishment can atone for the sin of parasitism.
A modern gentleman is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war he does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on it from passing to a foreigner. Such combatants are patriots in the same sense as two dogs fighting for a bone are lovers of animals.
The North American Indian was a type of the sportsman warrior gentleman. The Periclean Athenian was a type of the intellectually and artistically cultivated gentleman. Both were political failures. The modern gentleman, without the hardihood of the one or the culture of the other, has the appetite of both put together. He will not succeed where they failed.
He who believes in education, criminal law, and sport, needs only property to make him a perfect modern gentleman.