WORK IN LONDON
wreaths to all the world. She seems to hold them for bank clerks and for bargees, for charlatans and the Founders of Faiths, to poets and to privates in the Foot Guards, to actors as to all sorts of robbers with violence. But the appeal is on the whole a modern one: it was not until the wider world of woods and seas was nearly all exploited that the Occidental peoples "discovered" London. To enter minutely into this movement would be impracticable. It would take one very deep into that odd psychology of statistics that is called Political Economy.
But it had its rise, this modern appeal of London, at about the time of the triumphing principle of Free Trade;[1] it had its beginning at about the time when
- ↑ I have, however, just read the book of a well received Political Economist who asserts that it did not. The modern spirit is by him attributed to the "consistent, unrelenting, true-sighted policy of five centuries of English Governmental action to a protective system which, in fact, was only relaxed when the supremacy had been reached". It isn't, of course, my business to assert the one or the other dogma. The supremacy of London's particular attraction came at about the time of Free Trade. But Free Trade itself may have come because just then London had become supreme owing to five centuries of Protection. Or the reverse may have been the case.
Both are possible enough, because in the arena of Triumphant Principle pendulums swing backwards and forwards: the undisputed right of to-day becoming the open question of to-morrow, and the unquestioned wrong of the immediate future. That is a platitude because it is one of the indisputable verities. In the country they say that large clocks when they tick solemnly and slowly, thud out the words: "Alive—Dead; Alive—Dead"—because in this world at every second a child is born, a man dies. But, in London,
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