on. Suppose that whenever we heard of walking in England it
always meant walking forty-five miles a day without fatigue. We should
be perfectly certain that only a few men were walking at all, and that
all the other British subjects were being wheeled about in Bath-chairs.
But if when we hear of walking it means slow walking, painful walking,
and frequent fatigue, then we know that the mass of the nation still is
walking. We know that England is still literally on its feet.

The difficulty is therefore that the actual raising of the standard of
athletics has probably been bad for national athleticism. Instead of the
tournament being a healthy _melee_ into which any ordinary man would
rush and take his chance, it has become a fenced and guarded
tilting-yard for the collision of particular champions against whom no
ordinary man would pit himself or even be permitted to pit himself. If
Waterloo was won on Eton cricket-fields it was because Eton cricket was
probably much more careless then than it is now. As long as the game was
a game, everybody wanted to join in it. When it becomes an art, every
one wants to look at it. When it was frivolous it may have won Waterloo:
when it was serious and efficient it lost Magersfontein.

In the Waterloo period there was a general rough-and-tumble athleticism
among average Englishmen. It cannot be re-created by cricket, or by
conscription, or by any artificial means. It was a thing of the soul. It
came out of laughter, religion, and the spirit of the place. But it was
like the modern French duel in this--that it might happen to anybody. If
I were a French journalist it might really happen that Monsieur
Clemenceau might challenge me to meet him with pistols. But I do not
think that it is at all likely that Mr. C. B. Fry will ever challenge me
to meet him with cricket-bats.

AN ESSAY ON TWO CITIES.

A little while ago I fell out of England into the town of Paris. If a
man fell out of the moon into the town of Paris he would know that it
was the capital of a great nation. If, however, he fell (perhaps off
some other side of the moon) so as to hit the city of London, he would
not know so well that it was the capital of a great nation; at any rate,
he would not know that the nation was so great as it is. This would be
so even on the assumption that the man from the moon could not read our
alphabet, as presumably he could not, unless elementary education in
that planet has gone to r