Company-promoting, bee-keeping,
asparagus-growing, poultry-farming for ladies, the opening of a new
Oriental Tea-Pot in Regent Street, with samisen-players between four
and six, and Japanese attendants who take the change on their hands and
knees. London's one great stomach--how many eating places have we passed
in the last ten minutes? The place seems all taken up with inventing new
ways of making rich people more comfortable and better-amused--I'm fed
up with the sight of shiny carriages with cockaded flunkeys on 'em,
wooden-smart, rolling about with an elderly woman and a parasol and a
dog. England seems to have fallen back on itself, got content to spend
the money there is in the country already; and about the only line
of commercial activity the stranger sees is the onslaught on that
accumulation. London isn't the headquarters for big new developing
enterprises any more. If you take out Westminster and Wallingham, London
is a collection of traditions and great houses, and newspaper offices,
and shops. That sort of thing can't go on for ever. Already capital
is drawing away to conditions it can find a profit in--steel works in
Canada, woollen factories in Australia, jute mills in India. Do you
know where the boots came from that shod the troops in South Africa?
Cawnpore. The money will go, you know, and that's a fact; the money will
go, and the people will go, anyhow. It's only a case of whether England
sends them with blessing and profit and greater glory, or whether she
lets them slip away in spite of her."

"I dare say it will," replied Hesketh; "I've got precious little, but
what there is I'd take out fast enough, if I saw a decent chance of
investing it. I sometimes think of trying my luck in the States. Two or
three fellows in my year went over there and aren't making half a bad
thing of it."

"Oh, come," said Lorne, half-swinging round upon the other, with his
hands in his pockets, "it isn't exactly the time, is it, to talk about
chucking the Empire?"

"Well, no, it isn't," Hesketh admitted. "One might do better to wait,
I dare say. At all events, till we see what the country says to
Wallingham."

They walked on for a moment or two in silence; then Lorne broke out
again.

"I suppose it's unreasonable, but there's nothing I hate so much as to
hear Englishmen talk of settling in the United States."

"It's risky, I admit. And I've never heard anybody yet say it was
comfortable."

"In a few years, fifty