) is ready
to march nowhere--so long as it is the Other End of Nowhere.

The case of building houses is a strong instance of this. Early in
the nineteenth century our civilization chose to abandon the Greek and
medieval idea of a town, with walls, limited and defined, with a temple
for faith and a market-place for politics; and it chose to let the city
grow like a jungle with blind cruelty and bestial unconsciousness; so
that London and Liverpool are the great cities we now see. Well, people
have reacted against that; they have grown tired of living in a city
which is as dark and barbaric as a forest only not as beautiful, and
there has been an exodus into the country of those who could afford it,
and some I could name who can't. Now, as soon as this quite rational
recoil occurred, it flew at once to the opposite extreme. People went
about with beaming faces, boasting that they were twenty-three miles
from a station. Rubbing their hands, they exclaimed in rollicking
asides that their butcher only called once a month, and that their baker
started out with fresh hot loaves which were quite stale before they
reached the table. A man would praise his little house in a quiet
valley, but gloomily admit (with a slight shake of the head) that a
human habitation on the distant horizon was faintly discernible on
a clear day. Rival ruralists would quarrel about which had the most
completely inconvenient postal service; and there were many jealous
heartburnings if one friend found out any uncomfortable situation which
the other friend had thoughtlessly overlooked.

In the feverish summer of this fanaticism there arose the phrase that
this or that part of England is being "built over." Now, there is not
the slightest objection, in itself, to England being built over by men,
any more than there is to its being (as it is already) built over by
birds, or by squirrels, or by spiders. But if birds' nests were so thick
on a tree that one could see nothing but nests and no leaves at all,
I should say that bird civilization was becoming a bit decadent. If
whenever I tried to walk down the road I found the whole thoroughfare
one crawling carpet of spiders, closely interlocked, I should feel
a distress verging on distaste. If one were at every turn crowded,
elbowed, overlooked, overcharged, sweated, rack-rented, swindled,
and sold up by avaricious and arrogant squirrels, one might at last
remonstrate. But the great towns have grown intolerab