im to hold on to them."

"But aren't we, behind all that," said Barthrop, "an intensely sentimental
nation?"

"Yes," said Father Payne, "but that's a fault really--we don't believe in
real justice, only in picturesque justice. We are hopeless individualists.
We melt into tears over a child that is lost, or a dog that howls; and we
let all sorts of evil systems and arrangements grow and flourish. We can't
think algebraically, only arithmetically. We can be kind to a single case
of hardship; we can't take in a widespread system of oppression. We are
improving somewhat; but it is always the particular case that affects us,
and not the general principle."

"But to go back to our sense of possession," I said, "is that really much
more than a matter of climate? Does it mean more than this, that we, in a
temperate climate inclining to cold, need more elaborate houses and more
heat-producing food than nations who live in warmer climates? Are not the
nations who live in warmer climates less attached to material things simply
because they are less important?"

"There is something in that, no doubt," said Father Payne. "Of course,
where nature is more hostile to life, men will have to work longer hours to
support life than where 'the spicy breezes blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle.'
But it isn't that of which I complain--it is the awful sense of
respectability attaching to possessions, the hideous way in which we fill
our houses with things which we do not want or use, just because they are a
symbol of respectability. We like hoarding, and we like luxuries, not
because we enjoy them, but because we like other people to know that we can
pay for them. I do not imagine that there is any nation in the world whose
hospitality differs so much from the mode in which people actually live as
ours does. In a sensible society, if we wanted to see our friends, we
should ask them to bring their cold mutton round, and have a picnic. What
we do actually do is to have a meal which we can't afford, and which our
guests know is not in the least like our ordinary meals; and then we expect
to be asked back to a similarly ostentatious banquet."

"But isn't there something," said Barthrop, "in Dr. Johnson's dictum, that
a meal was good enough to eat, but not good enough to ask a man to? Isn't
it a good impulse to put your best before a guest?"

"Oh, no doubt," said Father Payne, "but there's a want of simplicity about
it if you only want to entertain p