th a
certain candour, a certain openness to impressions, which is only
equalled, we think, among his contemporaries by the whimsical and
capricious Mr. Hueffer: an artist whose interest lies wholly in
literature, and whose mania it is rather to write well than to arrest
the decay of our world.

In the essay which we have quoted above, Mr. Belloc continues:

The wise man, who really wants to see things as they are and to
understand them, does not say: "Here I am on the burning soil of
Africa." He says: "Here I am stuck in a snowdrift and the train
twelve hours late"--as it was (with me in it) near Setif, in
January, 1905. He does not say as he looks on the peasant at his
plough outside Batna: "Observe yon Semite!" He says: "That man's
face is exactly like the face of a dark Sussex peasant, only a
little leaner." He does not say: "See these wild sons of the
desert! How they must hate the new artificial life around them!"
Contrariwise, he says: "See those four Mohammedans playing cards
with a French pack of cards and drinking liqueurs in the cafe! See!
they have ordered more liqueurs!"

So Mr. Belloc would have us go about the world as much like little
children as possible in order to learn the elements of foreign politics.

But travel is also, quite in the sense of the platitude, an education.
All that we can learn in books is made up of, or springs from, the
difference between the men living on the banks of this river, and the
men who live in the valleys of those hills. The man who understands the
distinctions of costumes, manners, methods and thought which thus exist,
is tolerably well equipped for dealing with such problems in his own
country: he has had a practical education which prepares him for life.

Mr. Belloc goes about the world with a ready open mind, and stores up
observations on these matters. In an essay on a projected guide-book he
sets out some of them--how to pacify Arabs, how to frighten sheep-dogs,
how the people of Dax are the most horrible in all France, and so on.
It is a great pity that the book has never been written.

All this is human knowledge, of which he is avid. It has been gained
from fellow wayfarers by the roadside and in inns. The persons he has
met and gravely noted on his travels are innumerable, and merely to read
of them is an edification. His landscapes are mostly peopled, and if not
a man, perhaps the ghost of an arm