to have seen
most of the surface of this globe. But all these must wait until the
present preposterous price of paper has descended to more normal levels.

I consider myself exceptionally fortunate in having lived at a time
when modern conveniences of transport were already in existence, but
had not yet produced their inevitable results. It is quite sufficiently
obvious that national customs and national peculiarities are being
smoothed out of existence by facilities of travel. My father and
mother, early in their married life, drove from London to Naples in
their own carriage, the journey occupying over a month. They left their
own front door in London, had their carriage placed on the deck of the
Channel steamer, sat in it during the passage (what a singularly
uncomfortable resting-place it must have been should they have
encountered bad weather!), and continued their journey on the other
side. During their leisurely progress through France and Italy, they
must have enjoyed opportunities of studying the real life of these
countries which are denied the passengers in a rapide, jammed in
amongst a cosmopolitan crew in the prosaic atmosphere of dining and
sleeping cars, and scarcely bestowing a passing glance on the country
through which they are being whirled. Even in my time I have seen
marked changes, and have witnessed the gradual disappearance of
national costumes, and of national types of architecture. Every capital
in Europe seems to adopt in its modern buildings a standardised type of
architecture. No sojourner in any of the big modern hotels, which bear
such a wearisome family likeness to each other, could tell in which
particular country he might happen to find himself, were it not for the
scraps of conversation which reach his ears, for the externals all look
alike, and even the cooking has, with a greater or less degree of
success, been standardised to the requisite note of monotony.
Travellers may be divided into two categories: those who wish to find
on foreign soil the identical conditions to which they have been
accustomed at home, and those searching for novelty of outlook and
novelty of surroundings. The former will welcome the process of planing
down national idiosyncrasies into one dead level of uniformity of type,
the latter will deplore it; but this, like many other things, is a
matter of individual taste.

The ousting of the splendid full-rigged ships by stumpy, unlovely
tramp-steamers in the Ho