parish councillor; but it is manifest that nowadays even quite
ordinary people live over areas that would have made a kingdom in
those former days, would have filled the Athenian of the Laws with
incredulous astonishment. Except for the habits of the very rich
during the Roman Empire, there was never the slightest precedent for
this modern detachment from place. It is nothing to us that we go
eighty or ninety miles from home to place of business, or take an
hour's spin of fifty miles to our week-end golf; every summer it has
become a fixed custom to travel wide and far. Only the clumsiness of
communications limit us now, and every facilitation of locomotion
widens not only our potential, but our habitual range. Not only
this, but we change our habitations with a growing frequency and
facility; to Sir Thomas More we should seem a breed of nomads. That
old fixity was of necessity and not of choice, it was a mere phase
in the development of civilisation, a trick of rooting man learnt
for a time from his new-found friends, the corn and the vine and
the hearth; the untamed spirit of the young has turned for ever to
wandering and the sea. The soul of man has never yet in any land
been willingly adscript to the glebe. Even Mr. Belloc, who preaches
the happiness of a peasant proprietary, is so much wiser than his
thoughts that he sails about the seas in a little yacht or goes
afoot from Belgium to Rome. We are winning our freedom again once
more, a freedom renewed and enlarged, and there is now neither
necessity nor advantage in a permanent life servitude to this place
or that. Men may settle down in our Modern Utopia for love and the
family at last, but first and most abundantly they will see the
world.

And with this loosening of the fetters of locality from the feet of
men, necessarily there will be all sorts of fresh distributions of