Of old--that is to say, twenty years ago--the great majority of the English people suffered from a mental and general disability which was termed "provincialism." If you hailed from Manchester, or Liverpool, or Birmingham, or Edinburgh, or Glasgow, the kind gentlemen in London who size people up and put them in their places assured you that you were a provincial, and that you would have to rub shoulders a great deal with the world--by which they meant London--before you could rightly consider yourself qualified to exist. Against the epithet "provincial," however, not a few persons rebelled, when it was applied flatly to themselves. Most men of feeling felt hurt when you called them provincial. In the world of letters and journalism to call a man provincial was the last and unkindest cut of all, and it usually settled him, just as to say that he has no sense of humour settles him to-day. Then up rose Thomas Carlyle and Robert Buchanan and a few lesser lights, who said, "You call us provincials: provincials we undoubtedly are, and we glory in the character." This rather baffled, not to say amazed, the lily-fingered London assessors, and gradually the term "provincial," as a term of opprobrium, passed out of use. It is admitted now on all hands that the provincial is a very useful kind of fellow; and when the metropolis feels itself running short of talent and energy, the provincial is invariably invited to look in. Latterly, however, the Londoner and the dweller in English provincial cities have begun to exhibit a distinctly modern disorder, which may be called, for want of a better term, "suburbanism." In London, which may be taken as the type of all English cities, suburbanism is pretty well rampant. It has its origin in what the Americans would call "location." A man's daily work lies, say, in the City or in the central quarters of London. For various reasons--such, for example, as considerations of health, expenditure, and custom--it is practically impossible for him to live near his work. He must live somewhere; so he goes to Balham, or Tooting, or Clapham, or Brondesbury, or Highgate, or Willesden, or Finchley, or Crouch End, or Hampstead, or some other suburban retreat. London is ringed round with these residential quarters, these little towns outside the walls. A visitor to any one of them is at once struck with its striking and painful similarity to all the others. There is a railway station belonging to one of the metropolitan lines; there is a High Street, fronted with lofty and rather gaudy shops; there is a reasonable sprinkling of churches and chapels; there is a brand-new red-brick theatre; and the rest is row on row and row on row of villa residences, each with its dreary palisading and attenuated grass-plot in front, and its curious annex of kitchen, or scullery, behind. Miles and miles of these villas exist in every metropolitan suburb worth the name; and though the rents and sizes of them may vary, they are all