held to justify a passenger who speaks to his neighbour.

Clubs were established in London, not so much for the sake of the
cheapness and convenience of common sitting-rooms and kitchens, as to
bring together bodies of men, each of whom should meet all the rest on
terms of unrestrained social intercourse. One can see in Thackeray's
_Book of Snobs_, and in the stories of Thackeray's own club quarrels,
the difficulties produced by this plan. Nowadays clubs are successful
exactly because it is an unwritten law in almost every one of them that
no member must speak to any other who is not one of his own personal
acquaintances. The innumerable communistic experiments of Fourier,
Robert Owen, and others, all broke up essentially because of the want of
privacy. The associates got on each other's nerves. In those confused
pages of the _Politics_, in which Aristotle criticises from the point of
view of experience the communism of Plato, the same point stands out:
'It is difficult to live together in community,' communistic colonists
have always 'disputed with each other about the most ordinary matters';
'we most often disagree with those slaves who are brought into daily
contact with us.'[10]

[10] _Politics_, Book II. ch. V.

The Charity Schools of 1700 to 1850 were experiments in the result of a
complete refusal of scope, not only for the instinct of property, but
for the entirely distinct instinct of privacy, and part of their
disastrous nervous and moral effect must be put down to that. The boys
in the contemporary public boarding-schools secured a little privacy by
the adoption of strange and sometimes cruel social customs, and more has
been done since then by systems of 'studies' and 'houses.' Experience
seems, however, to show that during childhood a day school with its