“As a rule the footway is about four feet wide, and the whole structure is very elastic, so that, as it is guiltless of handrails, it requires a steady head in the passenger. Further, the central span often acquires a pronounced ‘sag,’ and not seldom an equally pronounced tilt to one side or other. Ancient rule says that the passenger ought not to look down in crossing such a place, lest the sight of water whirling below should unnerve him. In Kurdistan, however, look down he must, and make the best of the hurdles that form the footway; they abound in holes and other traps for the unwary, and a stumble may mean disaster. These bridges, then, though admirably planned (for they are true cantilevers), are not built in the most convenient manner. It is characteristically Oriental, this union of real fineness of design with great casualness in construction and in upkeep. The piers are invariably of stone, never of wood. Good timber is almost unknown in Kurdistan. The poplar grows well, but it is at best only a good pole. Stone, on the other hand, is embarrassingly abundant. “Dry-stone arches are thrown over smaller streams, but their builders, though acquainted with the principle of the vault, do not venture on a span of more than thirty feet!”[21] How do you like the antiquity of conventions? Does it not make you feel that the greatest part of mankind has never shown a particle of desire that its civil institutions should be improved? Note, too, that convention among men is inferior to the instinct of animals, for animals invariably repeat themselves with a passionate interest, whereas we in our formulas grow more and more unfeeling and automatic. Even rabbits when they dig their burrows seem to be guided by inspiration, as if routine work with them is an appetite, like love and hunger; so very different are they from the conservative peasants of Savoy, whose dull routine has delivered down through the centuries a primeval bridge which an hour’s thought could have improved. One day, let us hope, most men will realise that it is woefully commonplace to be as other men; then conventions will go out of vogue. Courts and clubs will invent new and good etiquettes every year; no game will be stereotyped; and laws will command that such and such things be altered and improved by given dates. For example, if an Act of Parliament decreed that during the next ten years all the railway bridges in England must be made less uncomely and less at odds with the needs of military defence, I have no doubt that compulsion, the scout of civil progress, would discover among engineers more than enough invention.