or to any place; and the proof
of it is this, that he thinks of England as a place. The moment we are
rooted in a place, the place vanishes. We live like a tree with the
whole strength of the universe.

The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. He is
always breathing, an air of locality. London is a place, to be
compared to Chicago; Chicago is a place, to be compared to Timbuctoo.
But Timbuctoo is not a place, since there, at least, live men who
regard it as the universe, and breathe, not an air of locality, but the
winds of the world. The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the
races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men--diet,
dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in
Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red paint among the modern
Britons. The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he
is thinking of the things that unite men--hunger and babies, and the
beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky. Mr. Kipling,
with all his merits, is the globe-trotter; he has not the patience to
become part of anything. So great and genuine a man is not to be
accused of a merely cynical cosmopolitanism; still, his cosmopolitanism
is his weakness. That weakness is splendidly expressed in one of his
finest poems, "The Sestina of the Tramp Royal," in which a man declares
that he can endure anything in the way of hunger or horror, but not
permanent presence in one place. In this there is certainly danger.
The more dead and dry and dusty a thing is the more it travels about;
dust is like this and the thistle-down and the High Commissioner in
South Africa. Fertile things are somewhat heavier, like the heavy
fruit trees on the pregnant mud of the Nile. In the heated idleness of
youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of
that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. We were
inclined to ask, "Who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies?"
But for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right. The
rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is
dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.

The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller.
The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope
makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it
larger. Before long the world will be cloven with a war betwee