will still hear: "Oh, such a one: he's a one-er," in the Clubs they still say: "So and so is rather a good man, isn't he?" whether So and So be a surgeon, an admiral, or the administrator of a province in Upper Burma. So the populations of the many towns that form London jog along together towards their inevitable rest. The associations that are forming around our Street Improvements are none the less poignant, because they are less historic in the large. For the poignancy of these things comes from the man, without regard to the object to which it attaches.
These sayings without doubt are so many platitudes: but if we consider Rest in London, we have to consider the Future, and to consider the Future, we must deal in generalisations, which are brave platitudes. There remains then the question of Physical Deterioration. "That Neurasthenia joke," said a modern doctor, a man looking half Jew, half negroid, but young and alert with beady eyes behind large spectacles, "It's as old as the hills. Jezebel was Neurasthenic; so was Lot's wife when she looked back; so was the writer of the book of Job. So was Edward II; so was Shakespeare, or whoever wrote 'Timon of Athens.' If we've deteriorated physically, when did the deterioration begin?" He paced up and down his consulting-room smiling, and tapped his patient on the shoulder with a stethoscope. "We've improved: we're improving. Why, my dear sir, what was old age in the mediaeval centuries? A man—a king—was worn out, crippled with rheumatism, too heavy-bellied to mount his horse
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