oth materially and spiritually, we and our society suffer for it: our
lives are not so large, we make more stupid and more universal blunders
in dealing with foreign nations.

Of the spiritual incentive to travel, Mr. Belloc has put this
description into the mouth of a character in an essay:

Look you, good people all, in your little passage through the
daylight, get to see as many hills and buildings and rivers,
fields, books, men, horses, ships and precious stones as you can
possibly manage. Or else stay in one village and marry in it and
die there. For one of these two fates is the best fate for every
man. Either to be what I have been, a wanderer with all the
bitterness of it, or to stay at home and to hear in one's garden
the voice of God.

There you have the voice of Wandering Peter, who hoped to make himself
loved in Heaven by his tales of many countries. On the other hand, you
have Mr. Belloc's voice of deadly common sense adjuring this age, before
it is too late, to move about a little and see what the world really is,
and how one institution is at its best in one country and another in
another.

Without any doubt whatsoever [he says] the one characteristic of
the towns is the lack of reality in the impressions of the many:
now we live in towns: and posterity will be astounded at us! It
isn't only that we get our impressions for the most part as
imaginary pictures called up by printers' ink--that would be bad
enough; but by some curious perversion of the modern mind,
printers' ink ends by actually preventing one from seeing things
that are there; and sometimes, when one says to another who has not
travelled, "Travel!" one wonders whether, after all, if he does
travel, he will see the things before his eyes? If he does, he will
find a new world; and there is more to be discovered in this
fashion to-day than ever there was.

It is Mr. Belloc's habit, an arrogant and aggressive habit, not to be
drugged if he can avoid it with the repetition of phrases, but to
dissolve these things, when they are dissoluble, with the acid of facts.
He applies his method, as we have already seen, in history: in travel,
the precursor of history, he strives to be as truthful and as
clear-sighted.

He wishes to report with accuracy--as a mediaeval traveller wished to
report--what he has seen in foreign lands. He looks about him wi