THE MARCH OF THE CARAVAN 155

old talkative, hail-fellow-well-met London was yielding place
to one more sombre and self-contained. Men went silent and
absorbed about their business: " faces do not laugh, lips are dumb;
not a cty, not a voice is heard in the crowd; every individual
seems alone; the workman does not sing; passengers travelling
to and fro gaze about them without curiosity, without uttering a
word."1 They were on the make, each man pitting his strength
and cunning against his neighbour and seeking not to make
things for the joy of making or to win the applause of his
fellows, but to amass sufficient wealth to keep himself and his
family in time of need. Their perpetual nightmare was the fear
of poverty. Unredeemed by the neighbouring field sports of the
countryside and cut off by the factory smoke and the high walls
of the houses from the cheerful sun, the life of the streets was not
to be borne without wealth. Those who had won it by their
sweat and struggle dreaded to lose it: "to have £20,000 in the
funds or cut one's throat" was their unspoken thought. Those
without it were driven back, as the fields receded, into a life ever
more drab and uninviting. Taine noticed how many working-
class faces wore a starved, thwarted look: hollow, blanched and
spent with fatigue. In their patient inertia they reminded him
of the old " screws" in the cabs standing in the rain.

In the world of the new city, property was the breath of life:
without it men and women shrivelled and died. Save for murder,
offences against property were more severely punished than those
against the person. A barman and a glazier for stealing 53. 4d.
were sentenced to five years' penal servitude: a hideous assault
on a woman with child was expiated with six weeks' imprison-
ment. The sanest people in the world, in their new city surround-
ings, were losing their sense of values. So long as a man kept
the law, the right to buy at the cheapest price and sell at the
highest over-rode all other considerations. Against the supreme
right of commerce, even duty as it came to be regarded, nothing
was held to weigh: social amenity, happiness, beauty. Whatever
did not contribute to this one,great commercial object was
neglected. In the British Museum in grimy Bloomsbury the
greatest masterpieces of human sculpture stood covered with
dust on filthy floors in a neglected yellow hall that looked like
a warehouse.

No one protested, for the English townsman had come to