"You mean that each generation has its own difficulties to contend with, and must therefore use its own special methods. There is a good deal in what you say, I must admit."
"Where I disapprove of modern philosophy," continued Paul, "is when it begins to sneer at the teaching of former schools. My argument cuts both ways; if we know our own business better than our fathers, they knew their business better than we do. Each generation understands what is best for itself; and it is just as foolish for us to deride our fathers' methods, as for them to despise ours. Their ways were the ways for yesterday, as ours are the ways for to-day; and the transference of either would be an anachronism."
Mr. Ford nodded. "I see; and I am almost tempted to agree with you."
"But besides the unwisdom of laughing at our fathers' methods, it seems to me such atrociously bad form. If a young man adopts verbatim either the religious or the political creed of his father, I probably shall not agree with him, but I shall respect him as an honourable man, who is just as likely to be right as I am; but if a man sneers at and is ashamed of the things which his father cherished and believed in, I regard that man as a cad and should decline to ask him to dinner."
"There you are quite right; I cannot bear to hear young folks jeering at the old faiths."
"But the worst is when they do it for social reasons, and not from any honest conviction," Paul went on; "it makes me perfectly ill to see men treat their parents as family secrets, because the good old folks do not happen to vote on the side of the aristocracy, or worship according to established form."
"They have an idea that in burying the ancestral Radicalism and Nonconformity out of sight, they thereby identify themselves with the high-born and orthodox."
"I know they do; just as some men think that to walk up to their business in a pair of riding-breeches, places them socially on a level with a master of hounds."
Mr. Ford enjoyed this joke: he rode to hounds himself, and was a good horseman. "And they forget that cutting oneself off from one's own class does not attach one to a higher class; it merely leaves one without a class at all," he concluded.
"Exactly," agreed Paul, "between heaven and earth, like Mahomet's coffin. I don't of course deny that it is a good thing to be well-born and wealthy. I only say that it is a bad thing to pretend to be so when you are not. I don't deny that it is a good thing to be handsome; but a man had better have a snub nose of his own than an artificial aquiline."