and where there is
a real public spirit luxury is generally allowed for, sometimes rebuked,
but always recognized instantly. To the healthy soul there is something
in the very nature of certain pleasures which warns us that they
are exceptions, and that if they become rules they will become very
tyrannical rules.

Take a harassed seamstress out of the Harrow Road and give her one
lightning hour in a motorcar, and she will probably feel it as
splendid, but strange, rare, and even terrible. But this is not (as the
relativists say) merely because she has never been in a car before. She
has never been in the middle of a Somerset cowslip meadow before; but if
you put her there she does not think it terrifying or extraordinary,
but merely pleasant and free and a little lonely. She does not think the
motor monstrous because it is new. She thinks it monstrous because she
has eyes in her head; she thinks it monstrous because it is monstrous.
That is, her mothers and grandmothers, and the whole race by whose life
she lives, have had, as a matter of fact, a roughly recognizable mode of
living; sitting in a green field was a part of it; travelling as quick
as a cannon ball was not. And we should not look down on the seamstress
because she mechanically emits a short sharp scream whenever the motor
begins to move. On the contrary, we ought to look up to the seamstress,
and regard her cry as a kind of mystic omen or revelation of nature, as
the old Goths used to consider the howls emitted by chance females when
annoyed. For that ritual yell is really a mark of moral health--of swift
response to the stimulations and changes of life. The seamstress is
wiser than all the learned ladies, precisely because she can still feel
that a motor is a different sort of thing from a meadow. By the accident
of her economic imprisonment it is even possible that she may have
seen more of the former than the latter. But this has not shaken her
cyclopean sagacity as to which is the natural thing and which the
artificial. If not for her, at least for humanity as a whole, there
is little doubt about which is the more normally attainable. It is
considerably cheaper to sit in a meadow and see motors go by than to sit
in a motor and see meadows go by.

To me personally, at least, it would never seem needful to own a motor,
any more than to own an avalanche. An avalanche, if you have luck, I am
told, is a very swift, successful, and thrilling way of coming d