THE SOUL OF LONDON
shifty, clever little rat of a chap dodging like a weasel with the ball: what will your Corporations of the future be like when those are the units, when you have swept away the love of place with your improvement schemes, when you have swept away all fear of public opinion by weakening our every individual tie? Do you imagine, really, that 'To-morrow will be like to-day but much more sweet?' Do you imagine that poor humanity will ever be other than poor humanity?"
So the shadow passes over their argument—the shadow of the Passing that seems, in that heart of the nation, to be for ever on the point of overwhelming those old things. Yet, as a matter of fact, it never really overwhelms them until the new things have already grown old. For all of old Westminster will not be swept away, there will still remain a fragment of the ancient monastery wall, pieces of the cloisters, old Georgian courts, when already the improved buildings of to-day will be found to be inadequate, insanitary, smoke-begrimed for certain, picturesque probably, possibly glamorous, and surely very old. For once a building rests upon the soil of London, it seems to grapple to the earth as if with hooks far stronger than steel; just as once a man is at rest upon his bier he is so strong that it needs four others to take him to his resting place. And, upon the whole, the Philosopher in us, the part which observes passionlessly, will be upon the side of the friend of the future.
Poor humanity, which works out its own destinies, has given its vote unconsciously against the Individ-
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