1^8 ENGLISH SAGA

barded by ragged urchins with brickbats, stood in a wilderness
of weeds frequented by starved and half-savage cats.

All this was founded on and excused by the national
passion for independence. In the new towns order was lacking:
custom which to the English is always the warrant of law had
yet to arise. The right of a man to do what he liked with his
property, labour and time— the triple-guarded heritage of every
Englishman— had still to be tempered in the urban England that
had taken the place of the rustic by a realisation that society
depended on a general performance of social duty even when it
clashed with the promptings of individual self-interest and love
of liberty. Punch put the prickly English attitude in a parable
.of a fire that consumed a long street piecemeal because each
occupier refused to subscribe to a fire-engine on the grounds that
centralisation was inefficient and mischievous, crying "Let every
man get his bucket and squirt and put out the fire himself. That
is self-government!"1 On the same principle a foreigner noticed
that when an Englishman went skating and fell through the
ice, it was not the business of authority to get him out of the
water.2 Instead, assistance was afforded him by professional life-
savers who hovered perpetually round threatened points with
the implements of their humanitarian trade. The efficiency and
promptitude of such aid naturally bore some relation to the
kind of fee likely to be paid by the beneficiary.

• •••••••

It was a good England for the healthy and successful: a
fearful one for the weak and inefficient Yet, for all the gloomy
horrors of its growing towns, the nation still had enough of
vigorous country blood in its veins to naaie light of its cancers.
It stood four-square to the world with a confident smile on its
good-humoured pugnacious face ready to take on all-comers.
Its wealth was growing day by day, its ships sailed triumphant
and unhindered on every sea, the beauty, order and peace of its
countryside were the wonder and admiration of every foreigner
who visite<f it. The loveliness of that Miltonian landscape, the
prosperity of its rose and ivy-covered cottages, the strength and
assurance of its thriving farms and lordly parks and mansions
blinded the indulgent eye to the darker corners of tie new cities.

*In London, where every citizen is free of bis actions so long as he does not interfere
with his neighbour, the police look on placidly and respect the skaters' liberty to the
' extent of watching them drown." F. Weyt A Frenchman sees the JBngfah in the »