Then Englishman’s need of “comfort” is one of his best characteristics; the possibility that he may change in this respect, and become indifferent to his old ideal of physical and mental ease, is the gravest danger manifest in our day.  For “comfort,” mind you, does not concern the body alone; the beauty and orderliness of an Englishman’s home derive their value, nay, their very existence, from the spirit which directs his whole life.  Walk from the village to the noble’s mansion.  It, too, is perfect of its kind; it has the dignity of age, its walls are beautiful, the gardens, the park about it are such as can be found only in England, lovely beyond compare; and all this represents the same moral characteristics as the English cottage, but with greater activities and responsibilities.  If the noble grow tired of his mansion, and, letting it to some crude owner of millions, go to live in hotels and hired villas; if the cottager sicken of his village roof, and transport himself to the sixth floor of a “block” in Shoreditch; one sees but too well that the one and the other have lost the old English sense of comfort, and, in losing it, have suffered degradation alike as men and as citizens.  It is not a question of exchanging one form of comfort for another; the instinct which made an Englishman has in these cases perished.  Perhaps it is perishing from among us altogether, killed by new social and political conditions; one who looks at villages of the new type, at the working-class quarters of towns, at the rising of “flats” among the dwellings of the wealthy, has little choice but to think so.  There may soon come a day when, though the word “comfort” continues to be used in many languages, the thing it signifies will be discoverable nowhere at all.

XIV.

If the ingenious foreigner found himself in some village of manufacturing Lancashire, he would be otherwise impressed.  Here something of the power of England might be revealed to him, but of England’s worth, little enough.  Hard ugliness would everywhere assail his eyes; the visages and voices of the people would seem to him thoroughly akin to their surroundings.  Scarcely could one find, in any civilized nation, a more notable contrast than that between these two English villages and their inhabitants.

Yet Lancashire is English, and there among the mill chimneys, in the hideous little street, folk are living whose domestic thoughts claim undeniable kindred with those of the villagers of the kinder south.  But to understand how “comfort,” and the virtues it implies, can exist amid such conditions, one must penetrate to the hearthside; the door must be shut, the curtain drawn; here “home” does not extend beyond the threshold.  After all, this grimy row of houses, ugliest that man ever conceived, is more representative of England to-day than the lovely village among the trees and meadows.  More than a hundred years ago, power passed from the south of