They cannot be naturalized without naturalizing their
conditions. The gray ancestral houses of England are the beautiful
symbols of the permanence of family and of caste. They are the
embodiments of traditional institutions and culture. When we speak
of the House of Stanley or of Howard, the expression is not wholly
figurative. We do not mean simply the men and women of these families,
but the whole complex of this manifold environment which has
descended to them and in the midst of which they have grown up,--no
more to be separated from it than the polyp from the coral stem.
All this is centralized and has its expression in the House.
Now as these conditions are not our conditions, the attempt to build
fine houses is an attempt to import an effect where the cause has
not existed. Our position is that of a perpetually shifting
population,--the mass shifting and the individuals shifting, in place,
circumstances, requirements. The movement is inevitable, and,
whether desirable or not, we must conform to it. So we naturally
build cheaply and slightly, that the house be not an incumbrance
rather than a furtherance to our life. It is agreeable to the
feelings to be well rooted and established, and the results in
outward appearance are agreeable. But it is not desirable to be so
niched into the rock, that a change of fortune, or even a change in
the direction of a town-road, shall leave us high and dry, like the
fossils of the Norwegian cliffs, but rather, like the shell-fish of
our beaches, free to travel up and down with the tide.
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