16 NOVEMBER 1907, Page 33

HOTEL LIFE.

[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."'

Sin,—In your interesting article of last week you are quite right in regarding hotel life as a danger to good citizenship. Whatever other virtues the more or less permanent resident in an hotel may possess, he is generally quite indifferent to local claims. He pays no rates directly ; he knows and cares nothing about municipal affairs ; he is a regular member of no congregation ; be subscribes to no local charities; his interest is reached by none of the appeals which rest on neighbourhood ; and he is altogether too much a citizen of the wide, wide world to feel that he belongs to any particular part of it. 1 haie worked for six years in a pariah in Central London in which hotels and boarding-houses predominate. I haVe known many exceptions to the above rule; but I have no hesitation in saying that, in the main, this convenient and increasingly popular mode of living tends dangerously to weaken many of those ties and links which in the past have done much to give unity and coherence to English life.—I am,

Sir, &c., R. B. TOLLINTON. The Rectory, Saint George, Bloomsbury, 19 Woburn Square, W.C.