lonists
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]

[10] _Politics_, Book II. ch. V.

The Charity Schools of 1700 to 1850 were experiments in the result of a
complete refusal of scope, not only for the instinct of property, but
for the entirely distinct instinct of privacy, and part of their
disastrous nervous and moral effect must be put down to that. The boys
in the contemporary public boarding-schools secured a little privacy by
the adoption of strange and sometimes cruel social customs, and more has
been done since then by systems of 'studies' and 'houses.' Experience
seems, however, to show that during childhood a day school with its
alternation of home, class-room, and playing field, is better suited
than a boarding-school to the facts of normal human nature.

This instinctive need of privacy is again a subject which would repay
special and detailed study. It varies very greatly among different
races, and one supposes that the much greater desire for privacy which
is found among Northern, as compared to Southern Europeans, may be due
to the fact that races who had to spend much or little of the year under
cover, adjusted themselves biologically to a different standard in this
respect. It is clear, also, that it is our emotional nature, and not the
intellectual or muscular organs of talking, which is most easily
fatigued. Light chatter, even among strangers, in which neither party
'gives himself away,' is very much less fatiguing than an intimacy which
makes some call upon the emotions. An actor who accepts the second
alternative of Diderot's paradox, and _feels_ his part, is much more
likely to break down from overstrain, than one who only simulates
feeling and keeps his own emotional life to himself.

It is in democratic politics, however, that privacy is most neglected,
most difficult, and most necessary. In America all observers are agreed
as to the danger which results from looking on a politician as an
abstract personification of the will of the people, to whom all citizens
have an equal and inalienable right of access, and from whom every one
ought to receive an equally warm and sincere welcome. In England our
comparatively aristocratic tradition as to the relation between a
representative and his constituents has done something to preserve
customs corresponding more closely to the actu