“We are twenty-four at this table. I do not believe there is one person here living in the house in which he or she was born.” This assertion raised a murmur of dissent around the table; on a census being taken it proved, however, to be true.
How can one expect, under circumstances like these, to find any great respect among young people for home life or the conservative side of existence? They are born as it were on the wing, and on the wing will they live.
The conditions of life in this country, although contributing largely to such a state of affairs, must not be held, however, entirely responsible. Underlying our civilization and culture, there is still strong in us a wild nomadic strain inherited from a thousand generations of wandering ancestors, which breaks out so soon as man is freed from the restraint incumbent on bread-winning for his family. The moment there is wealth or even a modest income insured, comes the inclination to cut loose from the dull routine of business and duty, returning instinctively to the migratory habits of primitive man.
We are not the only nation that has given itself up to globe-trotting; it is strong in the English, in spite of their conservative education, and it is surprising to see the number of formerly stay-at-home French and Germans one meets wandering in foreign lands.
In 1855, a Londoner advertised the plan he had conceived of taking some people over to visit the International Exhibition in Paris. For a fixed sum paid in advance he offered to provide everything and act as courier to the party, and succeeded with the greatest difficulty in getting together ten people. From this modest beginning has grown the vast undertaking that to-day covers the globe with tourists, from the frozen seas where they “do” the midnight sun, to the deserts three thousand miles up the Nile.
As I was returning a couple of years ago via Vienna from Constantinople, the train was filled with a party of our compatriots conducted by an agency of this kind—simple people of small means who, twenty years ago, would as soon have thought of leaving their homes for a trip in the East as they would of starting off in balloons en route for the inter-stellar spaces.
I doubted at the time as to the amount of information and appreciation they brought to bear on their travels, so I took occasion to draw one of the thin, unsmiling women into conversation, asking her where they intended stopping next.
“At Buda-Pesth,” she answered. I said in some amusement:
“But that was Buda-Pesth we visited so carefully yesterday.”
“Oh, was it,” she replied, without any visible change on her face, “I thought we had not got there yet.” Apparently it was enough for her to be travelling; the rest was of little importance. Later in the day, when asked if she had visited a certain old city in Germany, she told me she had but would never go there again: “They gave us such poor coffee at the hotel.” Again later in speaking to her husband, who seemed a trifle vague as to whether he had seen Nuremberg or not, she said: