Leisure classes

In Europe, in addition to all the above mentioned cheap methods of killing time painlessly, there is the craze for ‘sports”. A very small percentage of European actually play games. But they pay enormous sums of money to see others play and read avidly about games.

Such a sentence as the following, for example, is eagerly read by the poor man over his clay pipe:
“The great champions had ring craft beyond the modern boxer’s ken, hit their pile- driving blows, not from the shoulder but with the shoulder, every ounce of the body behind it, fulcrum from the floor.” The desire of the leisure classes is to be amused effortlessly. That is why the cinema, the radio, the newspaper, and the gramophone are so popular. Nobody wants to do things done for them.