But, on the other hand, the nervous system of most men will not tolerate the frequent repetition of that adjustment of the mind and sympathies to new acquaintanceship, a certain amount of which is so refreshing and so necessary.  One can therefore watch in great modern cities men half consciously striving to preserve the same proportion between privacy and intercourse which prevailed among their ancestors in the woods, and one can watch also the constant appearance of proposals or experiments which altogether ignore the primary facts of human nature in this respect.  The habitual intellectualism of the writers of political Utopias prevents them from seeing any ‘reason’ why men should not find happiness as well as economy in a sort of huge extension of family life.  The writer himself at his moments of greatest imaginative exaltation does not perhaps realise the need of privacy at all.  His affections are in a state of expansion which, without fancifulness, one may refer back to the emotional atmosphere prevalent in the screaming assemblies of his prehuman ancestors; and he is ready, so long as this condition lasts, to take the whole world almost literally to his bosom.  What he does not realise is that neither he nor any one else can keep himself permanently at this level.  In William Morris’s News from Nowhere the customs of family life extend to the streets, and the tired student from the British Museum talks with easy intimacy to the thirsty dustman.  I remember reading an article written about 1850 by one of the early Christian Socialists.  He said that he had just been riding down Oxford Street in an omnibus, and that he had noticed that when the omnibus passed over a section of the street in which macadam had been substituted for paving, all the passengers turned and spoke to each other.  ‘Some day,’ he said, ’all Oxford Street will be macadamised, and then, because men will be able to hear each other’s voices, the omnibus will become a delightful informal club.’  Now nearly all London is paved with wood, and people as they sit in chairs on the top of omnibuses can hear each other whispering; but no event short of a fatal accident is held to justify a passenger who speaks to his neighbour.

Clubs were established in London, not so much for the sake of the cheapness and convenience of common sitting-rooms and kitchens, as to bring together bodies of men, each of whom should meet all the rest on terms of unrestrained social intercourse.  One can see in Thackeray’s Book of Snobs, and in the stories of Thackeray’s own club quarrels, the difficulties produced by this plan.  Nowadays clubs are successful exactly because it is an unwritten law in almost every one of them that no member must speak to any other who is not one of his own personal acquaintances.  The innumerable communistic experiments of Fourier, Robert Owen, and others, all broke up essentially because of the want of privacy.  The associates got on each other’s nerves.  In those confused pages of the Politics, in which Aristotle criticises from the point of view of experience the communism of Plato, the same point stands out:  ‘It is difficult to live together in community,’ communistic colonists have always ‘disputed with each other about the most ordinary matters’; ’we most often disagree with those slaves who are brought into daily contact with us.’[10]