Page:Letters from England.djvu/75

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THE BIGGEST SAMPLES FAIR
 

through that feeble stratum of European interests which have enwrapped the whole world, without troubling too much about what there is underneath. The Wembley Exhibition shows what four hundred million people are doing for Europe, and partly also what Europe is doing for them. There is not much of this even in the British Museum, the greatest colonial empire actually possesses no ethnographical museum. . . .

But withdraw from me, evil thoughts: let me rather be pushed and thrust along by the stream of people from the apples of New Zealand to the cocoa-nuts of Guinea, from the tin of Singapore to the gold ores of South Africa; let me see the distant places and zones, the minerals and products of the earth, the relics of animals and people, all the things from which, in the end, crackling pound notes are stamped. Here is everything which can be turned into money, which can be bought and sold, from a handful of corn-grains to a saloon carriage, from a piece of coal to a set of blue fox furs. My soul,

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