Certainly The Cities Have Good Right To Be Proud, And I Waited For Them
To Boast; But They Were So Busy Explaining They Were Only At The
Beginning Of Things That, For The Honour Of The Family, I Had To Do The
Boasting.
In this praiseworthy game I credited Melbourne (rightly, I
hope, but the pace was too good to inquire) with
Acres of municipal
buildings and leagues of art galleries; enlarged the borders of Sydney
harbour to meet a statement about Toronto's, wharfage; and recommended
folk to see Cape Town Cathedral when it should be finished. But Truth
will out even on a visit. Our Eldest Sister has more of beauty and
strength inside her three cities alone than the rest of Us put together.
Yet it would do her no harm to send a commission through the ten great
cities of the Empire to see what is being done there in the way of
street cleaning, water-supply, and traffic-regulation.
Here and there the people are infected with the unworthy superstition of
'hustle,' which means half-doing your appointed job and applauding your
own slapdasherie for as long a time as would enable you to finish off
two clean pieces of work. Little congestions of traffic, that an English
rural policeman, in a country town, disentangles automatically, are
allowed to develop into ten-minute blocks, where wagons and men bang,
and back, and blaspheme, for no purpose except to waste time.
The assembly and dispersal of crowds, purchase of tickets, and a good
deal of the small machinery of life is clogged and hampered by this
unstable, southern spirit which is own brother to Panic.
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