REST IN LONDON
city of oblivion, consigns her dead to the distance of dim and grim suburbs.
At any rate, there they take their rest and grow forgotten. For it is impossible to imagine the ghost of, say, Macadam, if Macadam be buried in a London cemetery—rising up at the end of some dreary and immense vista, and calling to its fellows: "I made my mark in my day: I influenced you all." That unfamiliar voice would arouse no other spirit; late comers would answer sleepily: "Oh, our roads are all wood and asphalte now. Who are you?"
And, if that for all units be the pleasantest for our resting-places, it is also the most human of units for those still labouring on this earth. For, as soon as a city becomes a mass of Corporations, individualities die out and are wasted of necessity. We may consider Athens, which was a city not more vast than is Kensington High Street: probably its inhabitants were not really more cultured or more wise, but certainly they had, each one of them, better chances of influencing all their fellow inhabitants. And that for humanity would seem, in the Individualist's eyes, to be the best of social units. Only the most hardened of Democrats, seeing humanity not as poor individuals but as parts of a theory, as negligible cog-wheels of a passionless machine, would deny that, from a human point of view Athens was better than Kensington High Street, or than Westminster itself. So London casts oblivion upon her dead and clouds out the individualities of her living.
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