more, the worse,” Emerson said of city crowds, and certainly the most enthusiastic social legislator could hardly wish to make two such men or women stand where one stood before.  Scarlet and yellow booths, gilded roundabouts, sword-swallowers in purple fleshings, Amazons in green plush and spangles were gay enough.  Booths, roundabouts, Amazon queens, and the rest are the only chance of colour the English people have, and no wonder they love them.  But in themselves and in mass the crowds were drab, dingy, and black.  Even “ostridges” and “pearlies,” that used to break the monotony like the exchange of men’s and women’s hats, are thought to be declining.  America may rival that dulness, but in no other country of Europe, to say nothing of the East and Africa, could so colourless a crowd be seen—­a mass of people so devoid of character in costume, or of tradition and pride in ornament.

But it was not merely the absence of colour and beauty in dress, or the want of national character and distinction—­a plainness that would afflict even a Russian peasant from the Ukraine or a Tartar from the further Caspian.  It was the uncleanliness of the garments themselves that would most horrify the peoples not reckoned in the foremost ranks of time.  A Hindu thinks it disgusting enough for a Sahib to put on the same coat and trousers that he wore yesterday without washing them each morning in the tank, as the Hindu washes his own garment.  But that the enormous majority of the Imperial race should habitually wear second, third, and fourth-hand clothes that have been sweated through by other people first, would appear to him incredible.  If ever he comes to England, he finds that he must believe it.  It is one of the first shocks that strike him with horror when he emerges from Charing Cross.  “Can these smudgy, dirty, evil-smelling creatures compose the dominant race?” is the thought of even the most “loyal” Indian as he moves among the crowd of English workpeople.  And it is only the numbing power of habit that silences the question in ourselves.  Cheap as English clothing is, second-hand it is cheaper still, and I suppose that out of that quarter-million people on the Heath every fine Bank Holiday hardly one per cent. wears clothes that no one has worn before him.  Hence the sickening smell that not only pervades an English crowd but hangs for two or three days over an open space where the crowd has been.  “I can imagine a man keeping a dirty shirt on,” said Nietzsche, “but I cannot imagine him taking it off and putting it on again.”  He was speaking in parables, as a philosopher should; but if he had stood among an English working crowd, his philosophic imagination would have been terribly strained by literal fact.