ivilisation,
and which, though I do not remember that he ever used that word, I
suppose many people nowadays would identify with Socialism,--as the
Fabians expound it.

He was not very definite about this Science, you must understand, but
he seemed always to be waving his hand towards it,--just as his
contemporary Tennyson seems always to be doing--he belonged to his age
and mostly his talk was destructive of the limited beliefs of his time,
he led me to infer rather than actually told me that this Science was
coming, a spirit of light and order, to the rescue of a world groaning
and travailing in muddle for the want of it....

5

When I think of Bromstead nowadays I find it inseparably bound up
with the disorders of my father's gardening, and the odd patchings and
paintings that disfigured his houses. It was all of a piece with that.

Let me try and give something of the quality of Bromstead and something
of its history. It is the quality and history of a thousand places
round and about London, and round and about the other great centres of
population in the world. Indeed it is in a measure the quality of
the whole of this modern world from which we who have the statesman's
passion struggle to evolve, and dream still of evolving order.

First, then, you must think of Bromstead a hundred and fifty years ago,
as a narrow irregular little street of thatched houses strung out on
the London and Dover Road, a little mellow sample unit of a social order
that had a kind of completeness, at its level, of its own. At that
time its population numbered a little under two thousand people, mostly
engaged in agricultural work or in trades serving agriculture. There was
a blacksmith, a saddler, a chemist, a doctor, a barber, a linen-draper
(who brewed his own beer); a veterinary surgeon, a hardware shop,
and two capacious inns. Round and about it were a number of pleasant
gentlemen's seats, whose owners went frequently to London town in their
coaches along the very tolerable high-road. The church was big enough
to hold the whole population, were people minded to go to church, and
indeed a large proportion did go, and all who married were married in
it, and everybody, to begin with, was christened at its font and buried
at last in its yew-shaded graveyard. Everybody knew everybody in the
place. It was, in fact, a definite place and a real human community in
those days. There was a pleasant old market-house in the middle of the