t of huge extension of family life. The writer
himself at his moments of greatest imaginative exaltation does not
perhaps realise the need of privacy at all. His affections are in a
state of expansion which, without fancifulness, one may refer back to
the emotional atmosphere prevalent in the screaming assemblies of his
prehuman ancestors; and he is ready, so long as this condition lasts,
to take the whole world almost literally to his bosom. What he does not
realise is that neither he nor any one else can keep himself permanently
at this level. In William Morris's _News from Nowhere_ the customs of
family life extend to the streets, and the tired student from the
British Museum talks with easy intimacy to the thirsty dustman. I
remember reading an article written about 1850 by one of the early
Christian Socialists. He said that he had just been riding down Oxford
Street in an omnibus, and that he had noticed that when the omnibus
passed over a section of the street in which macadam had been
substituted for paving, all the passengers turned and spoke to each
other. 'Some day,' he said, 'all Oxford Street will be macadamised, and
then, because men will be able to hear each other's voices, the omnibus
will become a delightful informal club.' Now nearly all London is paved
with wood, and people as they sit in chairs on the top of omnibuses can
hear each other whispering; but no event short of a fatal accident is
held to justify a passenger who speaks to his neighbour.

Clubs were established in London, not so much for the sake of the
cheapness and convenience of common sitting-rooms and kitchens, as to
bring together bodies of men, each of whom should meet all the rest on
terms of unrestrained social intercourse. One can see in Thackeray's
_Book of Snobs_, and in the stories of Thackeray's own club quarrels,
the difficulties produced by this plan. Nowadays clubs are successful
exactly because it is an unwritten law in almost every one of them that
no member must speak to any other who is not one of his own personal
acquaintances. The innumerable communistic experiments of Fourier,
Robert Owen, and others, all broke up essentially because of the want of
privacy. The associates got on each other's nerves. In those confused
pages of the _Politics_, in which Aristotle criticises from the point of
view of experience the communism of Plato, the same point stands out:
'It is difficult to live together in community,' communistic co