Coming from the Continent, a “citizen of the world” feels at once that he has come from the backwaters into a great centre of human interest. London is not only in sheer extent and population the largest city in the world, so that Paris, and even New York in the restricted limits of its only interesting portions, seem quickly exhaustible in comparison, but it is the centre as yet of the greatest and most widely scattered empire the world has ever seen. The dweller in it feels that he is at the crossroads of all the world’s chief[Pg 263] highways. One can survey the world from here as from no other one centre. France, it is true, has a scattered empire also, but the average Frenchman has, for the most part, as little interest in the world at large as has the American of the Middle West. Italy’s empire and interests are almost wholly confined to the shores of the Mediterranean, to say nothing of the iron censorship of speech and press. Except for international sport and the spectacular, the average city in America is as unconscious of what is being said and done in other countries as is a man of the radio waves carried on the ether. By “listening in” he may at once pick up a whole world of sound and thought of which he is otherwise unconscious. In the same way a man at home may “listen in” to the international world by using special apparatus in the way of foreign journals or by personal relations, but these opportunities are limited to comparatively small groups. Here, on the other hand, that world is, so to say, in the air and not the ether, and one does not have to make a special effort or acquire exceptional apparatus to share in it. There are certain types of the stay-at-home smaller business Englishman who are as hopelessly narrow and provincial as Babbitt. But, even if one is not a Joshua to fell the walls of high society or the higher political circles, one is more apt here to meet all the time people who have just come from China or the Cape, or almost any part of the world, than one is at home to meet strayers from Dayton or Houston or Los Angeles. Moreover, if one picks up a dozen English magazines on the news stand and contrasts them with a dozen American ones, the wider range of interests at once becomes apparent. Of course, there are reasons for this. The main business of England, both in merchandising and[Pg 264] banking, is international. The larger business man has a direct interest in almost all quarters of the globe. Again, speaking broadly, there is scarcely a family of the better-magazine-reading classes which has not a member of it living in some remote corner of the Empire or of the world outside. Cape Town, Calcutta, and Peking are not merely far-off foreign cities which creep into the news occasionally as centres of political disturbance, but places where “Tom” or “Dick” or “Harry” is stationed.