business becomes slack in London itself, or when we desire to "air" our camping site.
The obsolete system of land tenure would facilitate this; the growing restlessness of the people; the desire for change of scene; the dearth of domestic labour; and, above all, according to this Reformer, the fact that no house ought to be more than twenty years old.
I suppose that such a London with its portable houses, its masked and numbered inhabitants (perhaps we should arrive at such a pitch of impersonality that a child would recognise its mother, like a sheep, by the sense of smell)—this London would be sane, sanitary, and beneficent to the human race. Most of us, being poor humanity, a prey to the illusions of dead poets, will shudder at what is raw and naked in this idea. But what is the alternative London that is offered us by the man who upholds the Past?
It is a vast stretch of mounds, a gigantic quagmire with here and there a pillar of a mediaeval church serving as a perch for a hawk's nest, and here and there a clump of trees, descendants of those in our parks, in whose shadow foxes and badgers shall herd, on whose tops the herons shall nest. The praiser of Times Past will tell us that the breed is deteriorating physically: it is growing hopelessly neurasthenic; it is losing its business energy. It has sapped all the blood from the counties; it is closing its doors to emigrants from the countries. It is breaking with the old Social Conventions: it is running blindly to perdition.
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