One of the first things that strikes an American when he slips over from New York, and finds himself, almost before he had thought of it—walking down the Strand, suddenly, instead of Broadway, is the way things—thousands of things at once; begin happening to him.
Of course, with all the things that are happening to him—the 'buses, the taxis, the Wren steeples, the great streams of new sights in the streets, the things that happen to his eyes and to his ears, to his feet and his hands, and to his body lunging through the ground and swimming up in space on top of a 'bus through this huge, glorious, yellow mist of people ... there are all the things besides that begin happening to his mind.
In New York, of course, he rushes along through the city, in a kind of tunnel of his own thoughts, of his own affairs, and drives on to his point, and New York does not—at least it does not very often—make things happen to his mind. He is not in London five minutes before he begins to notice how London does his thinking for him. The streets of the city set him to thinking, mile after mile, miles of comparing, miles of expecting.
And above the streets that he walks through and drives through he finds in London another complete set of streets that interest him: the greater, silenter streets of England—the streets of people's thoughts. And he reads the great newspapers, those huge highways on which the English people are really going somewhere.... "Where are they going?" He goes through the editorials, he stumbles through the news, "Where are the English people going?"
An American thinks of the English people in the third person—at first, of course.
After three days or so, he begins, half-unconsciously, slipping over every now and then into what seems to be a vague, loose first person plural.
Then the first person plural grows.
He finds at last that his thinking has settled down into a kind of happy, easy-going, international, editorial "We." New York and London, Chicago and Sheffield, go drifting together through his thoughts, and even Paris, glimmering faintly over there, and a dim round world, and he asks, as the people of a world stream by, "Where are WE going?"
Thus it is that London, looming, teeming, world-suggesting, gets its grip upon a man, a fresh American, and stretches him, stretches him before his own eyes, makes him cosmopolitan, does his thinking for him.