dramatic in its spectacular force. You say that there is no architecture
in Folkestone. But Folkestone, like other towns, is just as full of
architecture as a wood is full of trees. As the train winds on its
causeway over the sloping town you perceive below you thousands of squat
little homes, neat, tended, respectable, comfortable, prim, at once
unostentatious and conceited. Each a separate, clearly-defined entity!
Each saying to the others: "Don't look over my wall, and I won't look
over yours!" Each with a ferocious jealousy bent on guarding its own
individuality! Each a stronghold--an island! And all careless of the
general effect, but making a very impressive general effect. The English
race is below you. Your own son is below you insisting on the
inviolability of his own den of a bedroom! ... And contrast all that
with the immense communistic and splendid façades of a French town, and
work out the implications. If you really intend to see life you cannot
afford to be blind to such thrilling phenomena.

Yet an inexperienced, unguided curiosity would be capable of walking
through a French street and through an English street, and noting
chiefly that whereas English lamp-posts spring from the kerb, French
lamp-posts cling to the side of the house! Not that that detail is not
worth noting. It is--in its place. French lamp-posts are part of what we
call the "interesting character" of a French street. We say of a French
street that it is "full of character." As if an English street was not!
Such is blindness--to be cured by travel and the exercise of the logical
faculty, most properly termed common sense. If one is struck by the
magnificence of the great towns of the Continent, one should
ratiocinate, and conclude that a major characteristic of the great towns
of England is their shabby and higgledy-piggledy slovenliness. It is so.
But there are people who have lived fifty years in Manchester, Leeds,
Hull and Hanley without noticing it. The English idiosyncrasy is in that