Read "Post-Prandial Philosophy" by Grant Allen online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Strange that the wealthiest class in the wealthiest country in the world should so long have been content to inhabit a squalid village!
I'm not going to compare London, as Englishmen often do, with Paris or Vienna. I won't do two great towns that gross injustice. And, indeed, comparison here is quite out of the question. You don't compare Oxford with Little Peddlington, or Edinburgh with Thrums, and then ask which is the handsomest. Things must be alike in kind before you can begin to compare them. And London and Paris are not alike in kind. One is a city, and a noble city; the other is a village, and a squalid village.