Their clothing hardly bears thinking about.
And the congestion of them! Everybody was jostling against everybody in
those awful towns. In an uproar. People were run over and crushed by
the hundred; every year in London the cars and omnibuses alone killed or
disabled twenty thousand people, in Paris it was worse; people used to
fall dead for want of air in the crowded ways. The irritation of London,
internal and external, must have been maddening. It was a maddened
world. It is like thinking of a sick child. One has the same effect of
feverish urgencies and acute irrational disappointments.
'All history,' he said, 'is a record of a childhood....
'And yet not exactly a childhood. There is something clean and keen
about even a sick child--and something touching. But so much of the
old times makes one angry. So much they did seems grossly stupid,
obstinately, outrageously stupid, which is the very opposite to being
fresh and young.
'I was reading only the other day about Bismarck, that hero of
nineteenth-century politics, that sequel to Napoleon, that god of blood
and iron. And he was just a beery, obstinate, dull man. Indeed, that
is what he was, the commonest, coarsest man, who ever became great. I
looked at his portraits, a heavy, almost froggish face, with projecting
eyes and a thick moustache to hide a poor mouth.
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