been able to look at
Liverpool and Belfast and continue to think this: that is why he has
turned himself into a sham country gentleman. Earth is not heaven, but
the nearest we can get to heaven ought not to _look_ like hell; and
Liverpool and Belfast look like hell, whether they are or not. Such
cities might be growing prosperous as a whole, though a few citizens
were more miserable. But it was more and more broadly apparent that it
was exactly and precisely _as a whole_ that they were not growing more
prosperous, but only the few citizens who were growing more prosperous
by their increasing misery. You could not say a country was becoming a
white man's country when there were more and more black men in it
every day. You could not say a community was more and more masculine
when it was producing more and more women. Nor can you say that a city
is growing richer and richer when more and more of its inhabitants are
very poor men. There might be a false agitation founded on the pathos
of individual cases in a community pretty normal in bulk. But the fact
is that no one can take a cab across Liverpool without having a quite
complete and unified impression that the pathos is not a pathos of
individual cases, but a pathos in bulk. People talk of the Celtic
sadness; but there are very few things in Ireland that look so sad as
the Irishman in Liverpool. The desolation of Tara is cheery compared
with the desolation of Belfast. I recommend Mr. Yeats and his mournful
friends to turn their attention to the pathos of Belfast. I think if
they hung up the harp that once in Lord Furness's factory, there would
be a chance of another string breaking.

Broadly, and as things bulk to the eye, towns like Leeds, if placed
beside towns like Rouen or Florence, or Chartres, or Cologne, do
actually look like beggars walking among burghers. After that
overpowering and unpleasant impression it is really useless to argue
that they are richer because a few of their parasites get rich enough
to live somewhere else. The point may be put another way, thus: that
it is not so much that these more modern cities have this or that
monopoly of good or evil; it is that they have every good in its
fourth-rate form and every evil in its worst form. For instance, that
interesting weekly paper _The Nation_ amiably rebuked Mr. Belloc and
myself for suggesting that revelry and the praise of fermented liquor
were more characteristic of Continental and Catholic comm