and
something will have perished which our fathers valued all the more
because they hardly troubled to name it; and whatever be the stars of
a more universal destiny, the great star of our night has set. The
English had missed many other things that men of the same origins had
achieved or retained. Not to them was given, like the French, to
establish eternal communes and clear codes of equality; not to them,
like the South Germans, to keep the popular culture of their songs;
not to them, like the Irish, was it given to die daily for a great
religion. But a spirit had been with them from the first which fenced,
with a hundred quaint customs and legal fictions, the way of a man who
wished to walk nameless and alone. It was not for nothing that they
forgot all their laws to remember the name of an outlaw, and filled
the green heart of England with the figure of Robin Hood. It was not
for nothing that even their princes of art and letters had about them
something of kings incognito, undiscovered by formal or academic fame;
so that no eye can follow the young Shakespeare as he came up the
green lanes from Stratford, or the young Dickens when he first lost
himself among the lights of London. It is not for nothing that the
very roads are crooked and capricious, so that a man looking down on
a map like a snaky labyrinth, could tell that he was looking on the
home of a wandering people. A spirit at once wild and familiar rested
upon its wood-lands like a wind at rest. If that spirit be indeed
departed, it matters little that it has been driven out by perversions
it had itself permitted, by monsters it had idly let loose.
Industrialism and Capitalism and the rage for physical science were
English experiments in the sense that the English lent themselves to
their encouragement; but there was something else behind them and
within them that was not they--its name was liberty, and it was our
life. It may be that this delicate and tenacious spirit has at last
evaporated. If so, it matters little what becomes of the external
experiments of our nation in later time. That at which we look will be
a dead thing alive with its own parasites. The English will have
destroyed England.

CHAPTER VII

THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIALISM

Socialism is one of the simplest ideas in the world. It has always
puzzled me how there came to be so much bewilderment and
misunderstanding and miserable mutual slander about it. At one time I
agreed wi