For those who find their relaxation in the easy pleasures
of sport, the post-war world will bring no very serious deprivation. They will still, without undue restriction, be able to play their golf and kill their partridges. But for those who have found in foreign travel the supreme relaxation from the strain of working life, the penury of the post-war world will entail a denial, or, at least, a modification, of the joys to which they have been ac- customed. I shall not mind having to live cheaply, but I shall mind very much indeed having to travel cheaply. The pleasures of travel are for me so intense a joy that I do not wish my enjoy- ment to be marred either by physical strain or by the presence of many other tourists in the cities or among the valleys which I visit. It is a pleasure and an interest for me to be in the presence of my fellow counrymen when I travel to Oxford Circus ; but when I go to Baalbek or Epidaurus I prefer to be almost alone. There will be, I suppose and hope, many cruises in the post-war world on the analogy of the Kraft durch Freude. Yet even if I am allotted a worker's ticket to visit the Ionian islands upon such a cruise I know well that I should lose my Kraft and derive no Freude ; that it would be better far to tramp through Picardy with a bundle on my back. It is solitude rather than luxury that one needs on such occasions, and I dread lest in the post-war world solitude may become one of the rarest blessings to acquire. To the travel-maniac, who is too old to walk from Corinth to Olympia, the post-war world will, I fear, bring many deprivations. It will be at that point that the shoe of poverty will pinch the hardest.
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