Would you not turn away from that palace with the contemptuous thought--
Civilized? Refined? These people's civilization is but skin-deep.
Their refinement is but an outside show. Look into the first back room,
and you find that they are foul barbarians still.
And yet such, literally such and no better, is the refinement of modern
England; such, and no better, is the civilization of our great towns.
Such I fear from what I am told, is the civilization of Southsea, beside
the barbarism to be found in Portsea close at hand. Dirt and squalor,
brutality and ignorance close beside such luxury as the world has not
seen, it may be, since the bad days of Heathen Rome.
But more, if you turned away, you would say to yourselves, if you were
thoughtful persons--not only what barbarism, but what folly. The owner
and his household are in daily danger. The idiot in discontent, or even
in mere folly, may seize a lighted candle, burn petroleum, as she did in
Paris of late, and set the whole palace on fire. And more, the very dirt
is in itself inflammable, and capable, as it festers, of spontaneous
combustion.
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