I have sometimes wished that every Anglo-Saxon who from these shores has
sailed and seen for the first time the other Anglo-Saxons in New York or
Melbourne, would write in quite a short letter what he really felt.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred men only write what they have read
before they started, just as Rousseau in an eighteenth-century village
believed that every English yokel could vote and that his vote conveyed
a high initiative, making and unmaking the policy of the State; or just
as people, hearing that the birth-rate of France is low, travel in that
country and say they can see no children--though they would hardly say
it about Sussex or Cumberland where the birth-rate is lower still.
What travel does in the way of pleasure (the providing of new and fresh
sensations, and the expansion of experience), that it ought to do in the
way of knowledge. It ought to and it does, with the wise, provide a
complete course of unlearning the wretched tags with which the sham
culture of our great towns has filled us. For instance, of Barbary--the
lions do not live in deserts; they live in woods. The peasants of
Barbary are not Semitic in appearance or in character; Barbary is full
to the eye, not of Arab and Oriental buildings--they are not
striking--but of great Roman monuments: they are altogether the most
important things in the place. Barbary is not hot, as a whole: most of
Barbary is extremely cold between November and March.
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