the frequent repetition of that adjustment of the mind and sympathies to
new acquaintanceship, a certain amount of which is so refreshing and so
necessary. One can therefore watch in great modern cities men half
consciously striving to preserve the same proportion between privacy and
intercourse which prevailed among their ancestors in the woods, and one
can watch also the constant appearance of proposals or experiments which
altogether ignore the primary facts of human nature in this respect. The
habitual intellectualism of the writers of political Utopias prevents
them from seeing any 'reason' why men should not find happiness as well
as economy in a sort of huge extension of family life. The writer
himself at his moments of greatest imaginative exaltation does not
perhaps realise the need of privacy at all. His affections are in a
state of expansion which, without fancifulness, one may refer back to
the emotional atmosphere prevalent in the screaming assemblies of his
prehuman ancestors; and he is ready, so long as this condition lasts,
to take the whole world almost literally to his bosom. What he does not
realise is that neither he nor any one else can keep himself permanently
at this level. In William Morris's _News from Nowhere_ the customs of
family life extend to the streets, and the tired student from the
British Museum talks with easy intimacy to the thirsty dustman. I
remember reading an article written about 1850 by one of the early
Christian Socialists. He said that he had just been riding down Oxford
Street in an omnibus, and that he had noticed that when the omnibus
passed over a section of the street in which macadam had been
substituted for paving, all the passengers turned and spoke to each
other. 'Some day,' he said, 'all Oxford Street will be macadamised, and
then, because men will be able to hear each other's voices, the omnibus
will become a delightful informal club.' Now nearly all London is paved
with wood, and people as they sit in chairs on the top of omnibuses can
hear each other whispering; but no event short of a fatal accident is