s a hasty,
trial experiment, a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly and
wasteful kind. I suppose it was necessary; I suppose all things are
necessary. I suppose that before men will discipline themselves to learn
and plan, they must first see in a hundred convincing forms the folly
and muddle that come from headlong, aimless and haphazard methods.
The nineteenth century was an age of demonstrations, some of them very
impressive demonstrations, of the powers that have come to mankind, but
of permanent achievement, what will our descendants cherish? It is hard
to estimate what grains of precious metal may not be found in a mud
torrent of human production on so large a scale, but will any one, a
hundred years from now, consent to live in the houses the Victorians
built, travel by their roads or railways, value the furnishings they
made to live among or esteem, except for curious or historical reasons,
their prevalent art and the clipped and limited literature that
satisfied their souls?

That age which bore me was indeed a world full of restricted and
undisciplined people, overtaken by power, by possessions and great
new freedoms, and unable to make any civilised use of them whatever;
stricken now by this idea and now by that, tempted first by one
possession and then another to ill-considered attempts; it was my
father's exploitation of his villa gardens on the wholesale level. The
whole of Bromstead as I remember it, and as I saw it last--it is a year
ago now--is a dull useless boiling-up of human activities, an immense
clustering of futilities. It is as unfinished as ever; the builders'
roads still run out and end in mid-field in their old fashion; the
various enterprises jumble in the same hopeless contradiction, if
anything intensified. Pretentious villas jostle slums, and public-house
and tin tabernacle glower at one another across the cat-haunted lot that
intervenes. Roper's meadows are now quite frankly a slum; back doors and
sculleries gape towards the railway, their yards are hung with tattered
washing unashamed; and there seem to be more boards by the railway every
time I pass, advertising pills and pickles, tonics and condiments, and
suchlike solicitudes of a people with no natural health nor appetite
left in them....

Well, we have to do better. Failure is not failure nor waste wasted if
it sweeps away illusion and lights the road to a plan.

6

Chaotic indiscipline, ill-adjusted effort, spasmodic ai