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2nd Thousand 
 
 THE NEW 
 BRITAIN 
 
 by 
 
 WARWICK DRAPER 
 
 leing an Essay formerly called "The Tower," by 
 
 Watchman^ and written in time of War as 
 
 a Vision of Peace, 
 
 Price 2s. net. 
 
 JEADLEY BROS. PUBLISHERS, LTD. 
 72 Oxford Street, W. 
 
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 First published in ig i 8 as 
 THE TQW£%, by "Watchman" 
 
 %e-issued 1 919 
 
 / 
 
 
DEDICATION. 
 To G.D. 
 
 TO you it is natural to offer this image 
 of a Happier England, the first un- 
 published sketch of which, done before 
 the War, belongs only to you. And, indeed, 
 you know that I do so first offer it in the trust 
 that our own children and the other children 
 of this generation may see some fulfilment of 
 what it so imperfectly presents. 
 
 Tou would wish that on a public page of 
 print I should not acknowledge all that the 
 effort owes to the encouragement of your 
 fearless and tolerant opinions. But you at 
 least know why, being no professional writer 
 of books, I yet venture to put this small one 
 through the press. ' 
 
 In these dark days of public trouble it may 
 be well to say something in good spirits, and 
 wise to strike notes of cheerful confidence 
 towards a fabric of Society which shall have 
 less failure and baseness of Life than in the 
 days before the War, follozving Truth rather 
 than advertisement, and worshipping Great- 
 ness before money. It may be even wiser, 
 before the fury and wastage forced upon 
 unwilling peoples by a desperate and insensate 
 militarism yield to a secure Peace and the 
 momentous problems that will follow demob- 
 ilisation, to indicate lines by which ferment 
 and disappointment may be avoided and some 
 v 
 
compensation found for so much willing and 
 amazing Sacrifice. This image may seem to 
 make only brief, if deliberately definite , allu- 
 sions to certain changes in big international 
 arrangements and our own constitution, 
 both at home and overseas, towards which 
 we appear to be clearly moving. But those 
 changes will come with more durable value 
 and security to the State by an honest spiritual 
 conversion of the democracy through every 
 individual conscience than from without or 
 from on high. Parliament and newspapers 
 are all very well, if only we would all think 
 more for ourselves and in action continue to 
 remember our neighbours. 1 have therefore 
 tried to describe, out of certain recent experi- 
 ences, some of the conditions and motives in 
 our own Society which seem to be indispens- 
 able as means to the end, finding in the War 
 the great Opportunity . 
 
 We entered into the War out of a fidelity 
 to outraged Belgium which will endure as a 
 symbol of mankind's protest against the 
 materialistic idea of a domineering autocracy. 
 Less directly, but in very truth, we also 
 entered in because the inevitable end of a long 
 calm due to mutual fear is explosion. If, as 
 is likely with Britons, we are to save our name 
 for loyalty to contracts, public or private, 
 whether with fellow-countrymen or with 
 foreigners, towards either the powerful or the 
 weak, it can only be on the basis of willing 
 vi 
 
Altruism and of Liberty free from that fear. 
 Remembering that men and women must be 
 the slaves either of duty or of force, let us so 
 remain the former as to become the masters of 
 our own best Liberty. It is thus that States- 
 manship is found to be the art of understand- 
 ing and leading the masses or the majority; its 
 glory to lead them not where they want to go 
 but where they ought to go. Order and Pro- 
 gress in the new world, even more than in the 
 old, can only come that way. If, as we are 
 told, there is to be a revolution of human 
 hearts and social forms towards such a Free- 
 dom in this homeland, let us work it with 
 justice and moderation, worthily of our 
 Anglo-Saxon character at its best. 
 
 These islands are only a part, but the first 
 and chief part, of a Britain that henceforth 
 exists in every continent, mingling the ideas 
 and commerce of its English-speaking sons 
 and daughters with those of a many-tongued 
 humanity. With your leave, therefore, and in 
 homage, 1 also now offer this presentment of 
 the Tower set on a rock in the home-waters to 
 the men and women from all over the world 
 who, abroad and at home, will have saved it 
 for the purposes of the invisible and 
 intangible power which we call God. 
 
 Christmas, 1917. W.T>. 
 
 Vll 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. THE COMING BIRTH-HOUR i 
 
 II. IN THE LOOM OF WAR 4 
 
 III. THIRTY YEARS ON 13 
 
 IV. IN THE CHAPEL OF HEROIC 
 
 SOULS 20 
 
 V. A JUSTER INDUSTRIALISM 3 6 
 
 VI. VILLAGE COMMUNITIES 61 
 
 VII. NEW TOWNS 71 
 
 VIII. THE COUNTRYSIDE 87 
 
 IX. ON LEARNING TO LIVE 1 10 
 
 X. A MIDSUMMER FESTIVAL 127 
 
 FOR the meaning of the title of "The 
 Tower" the reader is referred to what 
 the Priest says on page 34. An emblem 
 of it appears on the map-design of the 
 Home-Islands of Great Britain, where the 
 colours have an economic significance — 
 purple and grey for the older crowded 
 industrial centres, the new ones, let us hope, 
 more green; brown for areas of mixed agri- 
 culture and golden-yellow for wheat dis- 
 tricts; light yellow for upland sheep 
 pastures, and green for districts where 
 cattle are most numerous. The encircling 
 sky carries air-craft with a great passenger- 
 ship for crossing the Atlantic, a smaller 
 mail-plane bound for Paris, and other un- 
 known possibilities for the future. 
 
 viii 
 
§1. THE COMING BIRTH-HOUR 
 
 YOU, reader, may know that cun- 
 ning English picture by Brown 
 which he called " Work," big with 
 anecdote and something deeper, 
 done about 1850 with hot pig- 
 ments and the zest of starving genius. In the 
 Hampstead street the navvies dig a trench 
 across the frequented foot-way where the city 
 banker and his fair daughter sit a-horseback to 
 watch them; the beauteous dame of bell-like 
 skirts trips along after the ragged weed-seller; 
 the orphaned children with " a philosophic 
 babe " watch the by-play of the dogs, and 
 against the railing lean the two brain workers 
 — one " a priest without guile, honouring all 
 men, never weary in well-doing," and the 
 other a modern Socrates, merciless against vice 
 and foolishness, one who " with a word may 
 have centupled the tide of emigration, with 
 another have quenched the political passions 
 of both factions .... and still be walking 
 about little known to some," but both aware 
 by the insight of prophets as to the daring and 
 endurance of navvy- work and its value. 
 
 Thus Madox Brown chose to paint Carlyle 
 who had cried, years earlier, that " England 
 is full of wealth, yet England is dying of 
 
The TOWER. 
 
 inanition " ; who foretold that " by degrees we 
 shall again have a Society with something of 
 Heroism in it, something of Heaven's bless- 
 ing on it ... . instead of Mammon- 
 Feudalism with unsold cotton shirts and 
 Preservation of the Game, noble just Indus- 
 trialism and Government by the Wisest!" 
 who murmured that " The centuries are big ; 
 and the birth-hour is coming, not yet come." 
 And two full generations later what would 
 Carlyle have said and Madox Brown have 
 drawn if in War-time they had watched one 
 of the thousand feverish centres of industry 
 producing unparalleled munitions of terrific 
 ruin ? With pen and brush what record could 
 they have sent on to posterity of Britain's 
 miracle — the unstinted contribution of valour 
 and sacrifice and endurance to a task as odious 
 as tragic, the grim, long Catastrophe wider 
 than Europe and deep as Hell, begotten upon 
 the mean or angry fears of a bewildered 
 humanity by evil demons of monomaniac 
 absolutism or desperate militarism or com- 
 mercial greed? Here, in this beloved land, 
 the western outpost of the liberties of the race, 
 the call to arms for myriads had the answer 
 not generous merely, but heroic. Into what 
 unity of a happier commonwealth could the 
 disaster be retrieved after such exhilaration of 
 Life-service, such willing and even merry 
 experience of the high- waged teacher, Death ? 
 2 
 
The TOWER. 
 Braced in fortitude by their own losses or 
 kindled by the hope of a nobler Society for 
 the up-springing children who shall inherit 
 the world left by War, the wiser among the 
 folk at home not only kept the fires burning, 
 but toiled in the workshops of the mind to 
 forge and frame a finer structure of human 
 affairs for the future. Thus Brown, chief 
 painter of our island's character, shall not 
 have painted nor shall Carlyle have thought in 
 vain, nor shall Ruskin and Morris have idly 
 fixed on the consciences of an uneasy genera- 
 tion their visions of what Plato and More had 
 seen before them. For nowadays, transcend- 
 ing the records of painter Brangwyn's robust 
 tribute to Labour and Bone's nimble, faithful 
 picture-narrative of endurance on that deso- 
 lated Western Front, and the paradoxes, too 
 tiresome if not too often true, of Shaw and 
 the brilliant, uncanny material from which 
 Wells gave history to a public that clamoured 
 for fiction, the War exorcised in clearer form 
 and more majestic dignity a compelling image 
 which man's inhumanity to man and the cruel, 
 subtle cynicism of every kind of ephemeral 
 despot had too long held captive in the caves 
 of Time .... 
 
t^» t^> t^> t^i «^> t//* ijO* i& tfr t&> <^> t^> t^» t^ t^» t^» t^> ^ 
 
 §11. IN THE LOOM OF WAR 
 
 t^> v^> «^> c^> t^J k5^ «^> t^i ctf>-> t^> t^J t^ t^ t^> t^> t^> t^* «^> 
 
 IN the third year of the Strife I travelled 
 from London to Coventry on a housing 
 errand. The intricate task of persuading 
 the over-driven directors of ordnance 
 works to insist upon the City Council (of 
 which some of them were members) so plan- 
 ning new workers' dwellings as to be a pride 
 and not a reproach for the future, and of fixing 
 the proportions between public utility loans 
 from Government and the money put up by 
 private enterprise was an exhausting affair, 
 and as I climbed the Sunday evening train I 
 resolved to leave the sheets of plans and 
 quantities and loosely drafted report until the 
 fresh to-morrow and to amuse an hour with a 
 stay at Matching's Easy in Wells's veracious 
 history of Mr. Britling. 
 • I had walked from the Daimler works to 
 the station, past the little ivied house where 
 (ghosts now of another day) Thackeray, 
 George Eliot, and Herbert Spencer once did 
 visit, to the Bridge on which Tennyson stood 
 to watch the three tall spires. Ceaselessly, 
 with columns of smoke streaking and smirch- 
 ing the sky and a hum as of many lathes and 
 benches, men and women and youths and girls 
 (what an apprenticeship to Life!) by day and 
 4 
 
The TOWER. 
 
 by night turned out the munitions of Death, 
 as if to agree with that same Tennyson that 
 
 he needs must fight 
 To make true Peace his own, 
 He needs must combat might with might, 
 Or might would rule alone. 
 
 Cross Cheaping was packed with a crowd 
 quite curious in its ways, almost artificial and 
 feverish to the first look, the maids dressed 
 out in unusual finery and few enough lads to 
 escort them until you saw, at a certain hour, 
 that in dingy, machine-soiled clothes or the 
 khaki of A.S.C. or R.F.C. the men were 
 among them. And as the time for the London 
 train came on, the crowd moved to the railway 
 to send off its " on leave " men or to see 
 others send them off — the sailorman, with his 
 ship's name blank on his cap and three girls 
 lively on his arm; the stolid, proud father 
 from a farm out Ryton way, come with 
 " Mother " and the children to God-speed the 
 boy to — what God might have in store for 
 him; the two sisters without a brother of their 
 own or another's to share the small drama, 
 wistful (if you could go behind the cheerful 
 mask of their healthy, honest faces) whether 
 the War they, too, were serving in would ever 
 leave enough lads to go round in an honest 
 mating; the upstanding, clean-knit figure of 
 a young corporal of artillery (in the counting- 
 house at Lipton's Bradford branch a year 
 
 5 
 
The TOWER. 
 
 ago) talking forced trivialities to cheer the 
 sweetheart from whom the train and the dark 
 Future would presently take him; the 
 seasoned, jolly sergeant, with a bit of South 
 African medal ribbon, in whom, as he chaffed 
 with his family and a civilian neighbour's, you 
 could not recognise the parade-ground terror 
 of the dull recruit; and scurrying wildly, like 
 a comment on a small cosmos that seemed so 
 outwardly healthy (yes, like the ragged weed- 
 seller in Brown's picture), a draggled, hunted 
 spectre of nobody's woman, some poor, sinful 
 victim, searching for someone, pitiful. . . . 
 
 Of such, before and since the days of Dum- 
 drudge, are they whom dynasts and things 
 dynastic have ever sent to War, Bellona's 
 heroic but unfamed servants. 
 
 Mr. Britling and his tale slept on for me. 
 
 There were three of my fellow-travellers 
 who counted; two others slept, tired or dull. 
 And these three seemed to me to be the 
 epitome of the whole — Saul, Hucks, and 
 Taylor, three musketeers for this journey 
 only, little likely ever to meet me or one an - 
 other again, and Saul will forgive me if we do 
 (but, indeed, I should like to). Hucks 
 (R.F.A. 6 1 st Division) was a bright fellow. 
 " going across next month," eager, sensible, 
 . . . . " last year, it makes me laugh, I used 
 to make the cartons for Player's cigarettes all 
 day, machine tending, and every morning of 
 6 
 
The TOWER, 
 a summer before I went to the shop I had 
 a spin on my cycle round Kenilworth or Dun- 
 church way, so as to keep fit." And Taylor 
 (6th Warwickshires), thick-set, big-handed 
 (like Michelangelo's great hobbledehoy 
 " David "), silent, used to animals, the kind 
 of lad who would not in the least understand 
 why the trade-union leader should moan 
 for him as " cannon-fodder," sat so listening 
 to our talk that one wondered if it was quite 
 fair to speak of preparing a better rural life 
 against the day of his return. And how shall 
 one forget Saul, dapper in a new outfit 
 of khaki drill, sun-helmet and all, R.A.M.C, 
 leaving to-morrow for Bombay ? He was not 
 yet one-and-twenty, the law's " infant " still. 
 He had seen a year of the real thing, " Festu- 
 bert and all that," in Strathcona's Horse, 
 from which he had been discharged or ex- 
 changed, so hurt in some way that he was 
 still pale and nervous. But before returning 
 to his home in the States (" My dad has done 
 well out of horse-drafts by your Govern- 
 ment ! ") he wanted to see more of it, and so 
 had offered for R.A.M.C. in India — not yet 
 twenty-one! Rather a dandy, his hair 
 brushed back like a shop-youth, he produced 
 a vulgar postcard out of Birmingham and 
 then (reader, this is what you call really true) 
 a grimy pocket " Euclid " which, when we 
 had done talking, he read up to Euston. As 
 
 7 
 
The TOWER. 
 
 a boy his father had sent him for two years 5 
 schooling to the John Lyon School at Harrow. 
 
 " It was no use! Tell Mr. , if you ever 
 
 see him, that you've met me. He was a 
 good sort, but he always said Saul was the 
 most tiresome boy he had struck, and I guess 
 I was! " And this lad, as Hucks and Taylor 
 and I listened to him, had already been in 
 bloody battles for the aims of the Allies, and 
 made no boast of it. . . . 
 
 For long that night the wonder as to those 
 three comrades agitated my brain. Where 
 would any two of them be when Peace 
 should return? By what right did I, of 
 twice their years, who had for good or 
 ill enjoyed the youth which they were now 
 offering, leave them to sacrifice it ? To what 
 England would they return when they had 
 saved her ? What common ideal, consciously 
 or sub-consciously, did they follow in leaving 
 field and workshop and crossing the ocean ? 
 Out of all this upheaving trouble, the sorrow- 
 pangs of such heroic self-deliverance, w T hat 
 lay among us, " convulsively, nigh des- 
 perately, struggling to be born " ? My 
 schooling, such as it was, told me that in the 
 old days, on so small a scale compared with 
 this, Saul, Hucks and Taylor had fought at 
 Marathon when the Athenians led their allies 
 against the Persian Dynast, who declared to 
 his hosts : " I intend with you to march 
 
The TOWER. 
 
 through all the parts of Europe and to reduce 
 the whole earth into one Empire, so that not 
 only the guilty, but likewise those who have 
 not offended us, must equally submit to the 
 Yoke of Servitude "; and that, once more, in 
 Saxon times they had fought with Danes 
 round a thorn-tree on the Berkshire down or 
 on the tide of Poole harbour as it streamed 
 up to the mounded walls of Wareham, and 
 on St. Crispin's Day at Agincourt, or on the 
 little wooden forts that chased the Spanish 
 castles round the coasts of Antrim, or, 
 backed by Prussians, had, after weary years 
 of struggle, pulled the French tyrant down 
 at Waterloo. So that, as the gentle American 
 sage could say, heralding the return of a 
 potent unity to the two great Anglo-Saxon 
 peoples, he saw England " not dispirited, not 
 weak, but well remembering that she has seen 
 dark days before; indeed, with a kind of in- 
 stinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy 
 day, and that in a storm of battle and calamity- 
 she has a secret vigour and a pulse like a 
 cannon." . . . 
 
 But how measure against this immense ruin 
 of great tracts of Europe under the storm 
 opened by the bomb at Sarajevo, a re-birth 
 worth the loss ? For what end (so works our 
 mentality, whether we reckon by theology 
 or no) will the thousands who built our stone- 
 walls or laid the hedges or sang an inspired 
 
 9 
 
The TOWER. 
 
 song or packed dry-goods, have kept their 
 rendezvous with Death and bloodily wrestled 
 with him for victory? What comfort shall 
 come to the father whom his son shall not 
 follow in his calling, and to the mother who 
 cannot again bear a babe and nurse and train 
 him to be a shining pillar of support? The 
 questions surge in their tide and will not be 
 denied by hardness of heart or blindness of 
 vision. What, cries the Stoic, means the 
 Friend behind all these Phenomena ? What 
 indeed? echoes the little Cynic. Oh, what 
 indeed? in agony murmur the widowed 
 maids, and the multitude of the bereaved in 
 all nations. 
 
 " There is no alleviation for the sufferings 
 of mankind except veracity of thought and 
 action, and the resolute facing of the world 
 as it is." Even Huxley's prescience had its 
 limitations; but what analysis, if he had sur- 
 vived to it, would his master-mind have given 
 to the organism whose growth our planet is 
 now developing! — its germs, its very nerve- 
 centres palpable to his touch, but its spirit, 
 its atmosphere, hardly seen. " Veracity of 
 thought and action." ... If only men and 
 women would think simply and bravely for 
 themselves, and so having thought, however 
 swiftly, act slowly in accordance with their 
 thoughts ! What blind entanglements, what 
 brutal maxims, might thus be avoided in 
 10 
 
The TOWER. 
 
 public and private life ! But, after all, " the 
 world as it is," which Huxley bade us face 
 resolutely, has for the modern generations of 
 our human swarm what the great Frenchman 
 who died by a bullet on the eve of the War, 
 called " an invisible ground of common im- 
 pressions .... forces half instinctive, for 
 that very reason immense and formidable." 
 And to Jaures, who abhorred the ugly spasms 
 of violent Revolution and laboured for the 
 methodical and legal organisation of the 
 forces of the proletariat under the law of the 
 democracy and universal suffrage, the great 
 outstanding fact of his world was the growth 
 in numbers, in solidarity, in self-conscious- 
 ness, of the workers, having at last a definite 
 aim and a clear ideal of a new social order, 
 It was the rise of the workers, " a flowing 
 tide, that the divine breath has stirred," which 
 Mazzini watched " not with fear, but with 
 the loving reverence with which one watches 
 a great providential fact." . . . 
 
 Blinded by the dream of your ambition for 
 a unity unknown to and unattainable by our 
 mixed humanity, vaulting in the dark among 
 your deadly fireworks for a throne as high as 
 the God's whom you dare to invoke as Ally, 
 art thou, O latest and last of the Kaisers, the 
 instrument of that very God, setting purblind 
 men to clear their hearts and, by this bloody 
 deluge of their own creating, sweeping what 
 II 
 
The TOWER. 
 is stale, unprofitable, rotten and unjust in our 
 human scheme away into the ocean of ob- 
 livion? Do Love and Sacrifice accept you 
 as their agent? Incredible, yet seeming 
 true. . . . 
 
 Thus excited in my mind by the day's out- 
 look on the world, I let myself, a tired travel- 
 ler, in at my lodging. 
 
 The outlook seemed so vast, so mixed, so 
 tangled, so desperate; big perhaps with a re- 
 birth for that nobler Society, mixed in an 
 infinite variety, whence Man could once again 
 trace the pattern of a scheme of beauty, and 
 therefore not hopeless, but full of wonder and 
 promise. If only thought could be deepened 
 and action simplified ! — the Real reached after, 
 beyond the grasped Phenomenon, Life's lets 
 and hindrances faced with a cheerful heart, 
 Life its own reward beyond the puny prize 
 for which we grope and strain, Life kindled 
 once again with the unending effort to attain 
 the God that is infinite. 
 
 " A dream," I murmured, as my limbs and 
 senses yielded to sleeping, after a day of such 
 tiring excitement. 
 
 12 
 
t^> t^> 10^ L0^ tj0^ t^> t^> e^> t^J t^> t^5 t^> t^> t^> t^> LP* tj0*l t&i 
 
 §111. THIRTY YEARS ON 
 
 t^> t^» l^» t^> t^« C^> «^» t^> «^> t^3 C^> t^> t^> t^> ttf>~. t^> t^> C^> 
 
 SLOWLY I realised what I was about, 
 as if great spaces were rushing past 
 me in a dream. What had roused my 
 mind was the noise of one motor after 
 another firing, propellers shining on 
 both sides of the fuselage of the great aero- 
 plane on which, it appeared, I was travelling. 
 The wonderful thing was climbing rapidly, 
 but steadily, on a long curve. As my senses 
 awoke I found I was leaning my elbows on 
 the rim of a kind of cuddy, looking forward 
 at the head and shoulders of the pilot and 
 another passenger, and now back at the tail 
 of the ship, her rudders and elevators seeming 
 far away. As the aeroplane swung bumpily 
 through lower clouds at a tilted angle, I could 
 stand the rush of air, exhilarating, bewilder- 
 ing. . . . But as she was put along a more 
 level road the speed drove me to shelter in the 
 chamber — where, closed in and at ease, I could 
 watch the countryside below me through a 
 latticed floor and sideways through small 
 windows. Gliding at 8,000 feet above 
 Mother Earth's uplands of Hampshire, what 
 wonder, what ecstasy ! " Wonderful is man," 
 said the Greek poet to me, as I felt the double 
 fascination — the curiosity to watch the pilot's 
 
 13 
 
The TOWER. 
 
 feet on the rudder bar and elbows on his 
 wheel, as by bits of inches he controlled 
 ailerons and elevator, and the vision of dear 
 England — the farmlands that roll up from 
 Southampton, the sheds by Basingstoke where 
 other bird-monsters dived and swept around 
 us, and just beyond, close to the South- 
 western electric railroad, that lovely Basing 
 village with its cluster of farms and homes 
 round the warm brick church and the broken 
 stream which in the days of the War moved 
 the hearts of the Australian soldiers as they 
 were borne this way. . . . 
 
 Following the track by Aldershot and 
 Farnborough and Woking, we sped through 
 a Surrey that was familiar to me, and yet, as 
 we drove near Wimbledon, seemed not a little 
 tidier, if I could judge rightly from above as 
 our pilot put his engines now on one motor 
 now on the other, the wind singing in the 
 wires as we sped on a decline towards the south 
 bank of the Thames. 
 
 We crossed the river at a low altitude. Our 
 pilot, it seemed, knew the beauty of it in the 
 evening light — the stream a kind of free 
 captive between the limits which our early 
 forefathers set to it, rising on the flood which 
 even at Westminster and past Chelsea and 
 Wandsworth to Hammersmith brings some 
 murmurs from the infinite sea, the sun's de- 
 parting glory setting bright plates of moving 
 14 
 
The TOWER. 
 
 gold on the wavelets, the church towers and 
 spires piercing the violet haze above the 
 wharves and the great sea of homes and 
 factories that lie behind them. What pageants 
 of history, visible and invisible, have thy 
 waters, O Thames, beheld? Did Julius 
 Caesar, as he forded them on a foray at Brent- 
 ford see. into thy future with his keen eye? 
 Did More, that wise, sweet Chancellor of 
 England, whom thy waters bore to do filial 
 homage to his father upon the King's Bench 
 of Justice, trace any way to Utopia along thy 
 tide? Was Morris, lured up by thy stream 
 from one Kelmscott to another, aware that the 
 big Tragedy of Europe would so speed the 
 coming of the Day for which he laboured, 
 preaching in the rain, singing the " Song of 
 the March Wind," praying over the grave of 
 a boy killed in the riots of Bloody Sunday : 
 
 Our friend who lies here has had a hard life and 
 met with a hard death; and, if society had been differ- 
 ently constituted, his life might have been a delightful, 
 a beautiful, and a happy one. It is our business to begin 
 to organise for the purpose of seeing that such things 
 shall not happen, to try to make this earth a beautiful 
 and happy place. 
 
 As the sight of the River brought these 
 imaginings resurgent to my mind, the ship that 
 carried me soared like the dream-carpet of an 
 Eastern tale upwards across the Parks to 
 Hendon, and I think I was drowsily affected 
 by my journey, for I was conscious of some 
 
 15 
 
The TOWER. 
 
 change come over the face of the metropolis 
 and yet too tired to inquire upon it, well 
 knowing that on the morrow I should be free 
 to wander in the old haunts as I might wish. 
 Our pilot brought us to earth with his skilled 
 control, and as the waiting mechanics guided 
 us to the aerodrome, I roused myself curiously 
 to see where I was and how I should be lodged 
 for the night. 
 
 A small, serviceable vehicle, not unlike the 
 invalid's " Bath chair " that made life tolerable 
 for my great-aunt Clara, only lighter and with 
 some air of Japan about it, glided towards me 
 with a jolly youngster of a lad perched at the 
 back of it upon a kind of bracket or dickey, 
 from which his fingers played easily upon the 
 stops of a board controlling the small storage 
 of electric power. The badge on his tunic 
 declared him to be of the same Service as the 
 pilot of the aeroplane which had brought me 
 from the coast, and the boy readily identified 
 me for his passenger. Along the up-track 
 centred in a main road between the horse- 
 ways that divided foot-paths, we sped easily 
 to — yes, to what I found I could still recog- 
 nise, though now happily settled with a 
 quality of decorous beauty that only wise 
 town-planning could inherit, the comely town 
 that they built north of the Heath courage- 
 ously in the face of the sceptical and the 
 cynical, St. Jude's spire of an artist-builder 
 16 
 
The TOWER 
 
 rising from the plateau in the midst of well- 
 laid ways and abundant gardens, so that this 
 suburb of the over-big Urbs or City proper 
 took a new dignity for that name. 
 
 My host, whom I had not met before, 
 greeted me as my cheerful charioteer brought 
 me to the door of a house on what I recognised 
 as the side of Primrose Hill, and I wondered 
 if I was in some scientific New Atlantis where 
 all facilities are rendered gratis or where I 
 should learn that the Commonwealth was so 
 ordered that, to match Bellamy's " Looking 
 Backward " or " Swiss Family Robinson," 
 each citizen had nothing to pay and all to 
 enjoy. But as I opened the handle of the car 
 door for dismounting a disc rose with a note 
 of my decimal fare, and as I paid it to the lad, 
 without argument or addition, he pleasantly 
 thanked me, and, as he wished me "Good- 
 night," I noticed that he slipped the coins into 
 a register at the side of his finger board. . . . 
 
 I went to my rest early that night, aware 
 both that some casual remarks of my host over 
 the supper table gave me a zestful sense of 
 anticipation which was indeed already satisfied 
 by a few items about the house and that the 
 morrow would show me some surprises in the 
 great town. The dwelling itself, a well-built 
 Victorian structure, quite familiar to me out- 
 wardly, had undergone some magic within. I 
 seemed to know that only some districts of 
 
 17 
 
 c 
 
The TOWER 
 
 huge London had been destroyed in that awful 
 week of conflagration when the desperate fury 
 of the beaten foemen launched a storm of 
 pitiless fire-bombs that put hundreds to an 
 agonising death, and incidentally wrecked 
 half Bayswater between Paddington and the 
 Park, and gave the occasion for a dozen well- 
 planned areas of rebuilding on both sides of 
 the Thames. 
 
 " Yes, 55 said my host, " we have been 
 sensible enough to alter many ways and modes 
 since the Catastrophe, as we call the War, was 
 finished. I think the big Industrial Revolu- 
 tion is chiefly responsible along unexpected 
 lines. 55 
 
 " How ?" said I, eager for a foretaste of 
 my morrow 5 s discoveries. " Do you really 
 mean that, after all, the tentative, wistful 
 strivings of those whom age or responsibilities 
 kept at home while the splendid lads faced the 
 Hell in Europe, did achieve the revolution; 
 did reconstruct and make some compensation 
 even for the sacrifice? I so well remember 
 how much we conferred and discussed with 
 what at times seemed like babble when the 
 news of action came in each day from the 
 Front, and, as the Bishop said sorrowfully, 
 " how little yet seems to come out of it ! 55 
 
 " You shall see and hear for yourself in 
 these coming days. To-night I only mean 
 these things, 55 and his hands indicated the 
 18 
 
The TOWER 
 
 useful, better - made furniture we used, the 
 service-lift in the corner of the transformed 
 house which let his boys fetch the food as it 
 came up from the kitchen, and, as I had found 
 already, ran up usefully to the bedrooms 
 above; the simple and more beautiful styles of 
 dressing the walls, the electric toaster and 
 other handy fittings, " these things, I do be- 
 lieve, came along quite quietly and naturally, 
 because Industry became autonomous and ex- 
 changed old-fashioned ways for pay, and 
 enjoys, as we have it, a sort of functional free- 
 play, as our new economists call it." 
 " I hardly understand you," I said. 
 " You would not," he said, smiling. " And 
 your journey will have made you drowsy. We 
 all find that at night, though it means an ex- 
 hilaration for the morrow's work. You will 
 like to sleep." 
 
 And the elder of his lads, a school-boy still as 
 I found, led me to my room, and showed me 
 the shutter fastenings and how I could operate 
 them from the head of my bed in the morn- 
 ing when a small bell would tell me that a cup 
 of tea and shaving water were waiting in the 
 lift cupboard off the dressing room. 
 
 x 9 
 
C^l t^i t^> <^> C^3 t<^ C^l t^> t^> t^l t^S t^> t^5 t^> t^» t^» t^> «^» 
 
 §IV. IN THE CHAPEL OF HEROIC 
 SOULS 
 
 IN the morning my host was astir early, 
 attending to the motors and dynamos 
 of the family wheels — the children's 
 light " cycles," as they still called them, 
 which bore them without strain over 
 the easy gradients of the town on their ways 
 to school as well as for excursions on the free 
 home-days, and his own two-seated car, 
 alternatively impelled by steam for longer 
 journeys and contrived to generate its own 
 electricity. Speedily he drove me down into 
 the City, along the shining centre-track of 
 the new Hendon Road which pierced its 
 broad way between strange warehouses and 
 workshops that struck me as remarkable in 
 themselves and as usefully substituted round 
 the Railway Termini for the ugly, perverted 
 Bayswater and Paddington dwellings that I 
 remembered from the days before the Great 
 Fire. 
 
 I was an hour too early to present at West - 
 minster my credentials that I had found in my 
 host's letter-locker at the neat little Pneumatic 
 Post Office at the end of his road. So he put 
 me off his car at Trafalgar Square, which 
 I was not surprised to find at last laid out with 
 a really beautiful formal garden of stone- work 
 20 
 
The TOWER 
 
 and evergreen trees, and fountains that per- 
 petually gave out the peaceful liveliness of 
 playing waters. 
 
 A quite natural sense of calm, even amid 
 the hum and roar of the traffic outside the 
 great hedge that the trees provided, came from 
 the tall central " Pillar of Sacrifice " (raised 
 on the site where a gale had shattered the air- 
 raid shaken Nelson Column) which I seemed 
 to remember that the sculptor Gill and the 
 architect Holden designed in the early years 
 of the War as a memorial to Overseas Heroes. 
 Upon the soaring column of a hundred 
 and fifty feet, set upon a firm square base 
 wherein was a chamber containing the names 
 of the fallen inscribed on swinging panels, the 
 majestic figure of Christ, with rested sword 
 in pierced hands, gazed quietly down upon 
 the world, triumphant over the death and suf- 
 fering symbolised by his own crucified body 
 carved in relief below. And in shallower 
 relief, cut along a frieze of Hopton-Wood 
 stone set between dark bands of Purbeck 
 marble all round the base of the Pillar, and 
 above long benches where flower-sellers 
 were already beginning to set out their mer- 
 chandise, I wondered at the portrayal of all 
 those types of our manhood and womanhood 
 that the bewildering catastrophe summoned 
 willing to the warfare and its side-struggles 
 — the Grenfells, Blackwoods, Listers, Butter ~ 
 
 21 
 
The TOWER 
 
 worths, Chavasses, Sidgwicks, and Brookes of 
 every rank, and the Hoods and Cornwalls of 
 the devoted Navy, the heroic Peels and 
 Cavells of the chaplains and nurses, the 
 Angells of every munition factory, the 
 women on the land and in offices and banks 
 — shown, with the true artist's Greek insight, 
 not mangled, stiff, awkward, or inanimate, 
 but exultant in their grace or strength, active, 
 eager. . . . The only lettering, upon the 
 front of this frieze, was the cry of mingled 
 gratitude, humility and pride : — 
 
 OUR SONS AND OUR DAUGHTERS 
 WHO HAVE SHOWN US GOD. 
 
 Had their service an4 oblation after all 
 proved the beginnings of the New Life ? 
 
 I walked to the River dov/n a new Mall, 
 aware, as my fascinated gaze moved along the 
 alert and briskly moving crowds of workers, 
 along the pavements, that the great blot of 
 Charing Cross Railway Station was abolished, 
 and that, behind a wide and open public place 
 and some half-concealed beautiful structure 
 which divided the roadway, a broad new 
 Bridge was flung across the Thames for 
 London's use and adornment. 
 
 As I approached this building, its meaning 
 became inevitable — it was the Chapel of 
 Heroic Souls where the masons and the 
 carvers were still at work upon decorating 
 its exterior, so sincere and patient was the 
 
 22 
 
The TOWER 
 
 wise desire to give only the very best of work - 
 manship to it. I had not imagined my 
 countrymen could produce anything so really 
 beautiful as this shrine, and I can hardly 
 describe it to you. It was as if the spirits of 
 those old craftsmen of Northern France and 
 Flanders and Italy and Bohemia, whose handi- 
 work had been foully battered and murdered, 
 had come, refugees to our island, to add 
 their grateful inspiration to the craftsman- 
 ship of our own artists. At least, the occasion 
 and some wise controlling word must have 
 conspired in an act of very noble and sustained 
 commemoration. 
 
 You will know that to assert its dignity 
 among high modern city structures a small 
 building must be ornate. This Chapel was 
 ornate without fussiness, rich but not garish. 
 Even in the quiet morning light its pinkish 
 Norman stone, sent in tribute by France, 
 glowed when you found it closely inside the 
 circle of cypresses which both screened it from 
 the city traffic and was of itself an object of 
 beauty along the converging ways of Mall, 
 Bridge and Embankment. It made me think 
 of that lovely cloister of Sant' Ambrogio at 
 Milan as I passed along the arcaded forecourt 
 or atrium, where rest and meditation were at 
 ease; and I was aware of some curious but 
 eye-pleasing tables of mosaics set out with 
 enamelled emblems and the golden names of 
 2 3 
 
The TOWER 
 
 regimental divisions and territorial battalions 
 which, as I learned later, commemorated the 
 chief acts and scenes of that terrible warfare 
 in all Earth's continents. I think, however, 
 that the only note of visible sadness in the 
 whole building came from the pathetic dignity 
 of the three Fates seated in the calm of their 
 marble under the canopy of the deep-set porch 
 of entrance, impressive with their gracious 
 austerity, kindly divine women, dividing the 
 eternal task of mortality, invincible to all 
 comers, unfriendly to none but the cowardly 
 and the unjust. 
 
 Within, this cruciform Temple had a mode 
 of its own, fashioned not for preaching or 
 massed congregation, but for commemora- 
 tion and reflection. Its wings or transepts 
 were not smaller than what we called the nave 
 or chancel; but the decoration of the walls 
 and roofs and the up-lift of the stairways 
 which, on left and right, led up to the high 
 altar as at San Miniato above Florence or, in 
 a way, in our own Wimborne Minster, en- 
 tirely dispelled any sense of uniformity. I 
 could not see the shrine or altar-table. The 
 lighting seemed to come, not by the few and 
 narrow windows which were filled with very 
 rich and beautiful glass, but upwards from the 
 open pavement of the floor, on which there 
 were only a few benches of carved stone, and 
 along which the open doorways threw shafts 
 24 
 
The TOWER 
 of sunshine. More light came downwards 
 from a concealed clerestory below the dome. 
 I have hinted that the sculptors and masons, 
 men trained, as I guess, in the varying 
 schools of Frampton and Gill and Derwent 
 Wood, had vied in making the exterior of 
 this Chapel rich with suggestion of the stimu- 
 lating heroism of saintly men and women. 
 Within, the only figures obvious to the eye 
 were four. The walls were lovely with a 
 scheme of blue and silver and some black, but 
 across the chancel and half-way up the altar- 
 stairs was set a gorgeous screen of painted 
 wood which reminded me of a deserted church 
 in the Breton hills. Its panels were distinct 
 with figures and emblems symbolising the 
 chief relations, crises and aspirations of human 
 life, cunningly bordered and linked up with 
 the representation of all animal and vegetable 
 nature. Over the central arch of this screen, 
 in three niches, stood three Divine Mothers 
 in whom mankind in its highest moods has 
 worshipped the ideas of love, mercy and con- 
 solation. On the left Demeter, the bountiful, 
 kindly Greek Mother of the South, soft with 
 recurrent grief for her lost Persephone; in 
 the centre, Mary, the Christian Mother of the 
 pure-souled Jesus, who leavened the whole 
 world with his secret methods of sweet- 
 reasonableness and altruism; on the right the 
 Buddhist Kuanyim, the charitable guardian 
 25 
 
The TOWER 
 
 of hoping mothers and tender infants, her 
 face turned northwards to contemplate the 
 distresses of the cold world. Hung above 
 them, too remote whether in the altitude of 
 the Chapel's height or in the distance from 
 the time of his Passion for us to feel sensibly 
 the poignant tragedy of his limbs that sagged 
 upon the cruel Cross, the form of Jesus de- 
 clared the issue to which he at least, in 
 the Syrian story, was willing to push the test 
 of all that he taught to be the real wealth- - 
 Grace, Peace, Living Water, Bread of Life, 
 the Kingdom of God, all that in right living 
 was brimful of promise and of joy. A 
 mystery perhaps, but who is to say whether 
 such a saint died rather for all those whom 
 this Chapel honoured, or they for him ? 
 
 And high above this screen and the lighting 
 gallery which I spoke of, was lifted a dome 
 which soared in the worship of its own con- 
 ception, although physically of no great 
 height. For the writing in great letters along 
 a frieze beneath it declared the Praise of God, 
 that great Majesty and Power outside us, not 
 ourselves, that is, as some would say, finite 
 like Man and yet is surely somehow infinite : 
 
 The heavens are telling Jehovah's glory, the sounding 
 spheres His power proclaim; the earth, the oceans, are 
 loud with the story; revere, O man, His awful name! 
 To Him the stars their homage render, He clothes the 
 sun with beams of gold; when high in heaven He 
 laughs in His splendour, and runs His course, a giant 
 bold. 26 
 
The TOWER 
 
 For God, whom we must need love for 
 what He is and not only for what He is try- 
 ing to do, is indeed an artist as well as a 
 philanthropist. Men and women instinc- 
 tively know that, and therefore need the praise 
 of art for declaring nature. Thus, here in 
 the dome itself, so that I knew instinctively 
 that human artists like Cayley Robinson and 
 Henry Wilson and their followers must have 
 designed the brilliant and yet severe scheme 
 of celestial loveliness above the tree-tops and 
 the birds, was a Vision of Beauty above all 
 seen and measurable things. . . . 
 
 It was a needed relief, before walking out 
 into the hum and stir of the world, to read 
 the comfortable words that ran in gold letter- 
 ing over the green bird-and-fish embroidered 
 hangings which, except for a few cunningly 
 wrought lamp-holders, were the only orna- 
 ment beneath the calm loveliness of the walls, 
 the comfort of 
 
 Those thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, 
 And with their mild persistence urge man's search 
 To vaster issues. 
 
 For here I read : 
 
 Men must love the creation they work in the midst of, 
 
 and what St. Thomas a Kempis said : 
 
 If a man would but take notice what peace he brings 
 to himself and what joy to others merely by managing 
 himself rightly. 
 
 And again what St. Paul said : 
 27 
 
The TOWER 
 
 We are saved by hope, but hope that is seen is not 
 hope. 
 
 And Mazzini : 
 
 I love Jesus as the man who has loved the most of all 
 mankind, servants and masters, rich and poor, Brahmins 
 and Helots or Parias. 
 
 And Bacon : 
 
 A little natural philosophy and the first entrance into 
 it inclines men's opinions to Atheism, but, on the other 
 hand, natural philosophy and wading into it brings 
 men's minds about again to religion. 
 
 And Joubert : 
 
 Piety is not a religion, although it is the soul of all 
 religions. . . . Religion is neither a theology nor 
 a theosophy; it is more than that, it is a discipline, a 
 law, a yoke, an indissoluble engagement. It must be 
 loved as a kind of country and nursing mother. 
 
 And St. James : 
 
 Pure religion and undefiled before God and the 
 Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their 
 affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world. 
 
 And among the inscribed sayings of Jesus 
 that one which the sands of Egypt, as I re- 
 called in my own time, restored to his Book 
 of Testament : 
 
 Wherever there is one alone, I am with him. Raise 
 the stone and there shalt thou find me; cleave the 
 wood, and there am I. 
 
 As I read them, a strong, kindly voice said 
 quietly at my ear (for there happened at that 
 hour to be none at prayer in the Chapel) : 
 
 " You seem, stranger, to be admiring our 
 Holy Place ? " 
 
 28 
 
The TOWER 
 
 I turned and faced a tall and elderly man 
 whom at once I knew to be a Priest in his 
 dark gown, erect as a soldier, one empty sleeve 
 pinned to his breast, his countenance that of 
 a practical mystic, a friendly man and attrac- 
 tive. 
 
 " I think that it seems a holy place beyond 
 what I would have expected out of an age 
 inheriting the divergent and chaotic notions 
 of my generation. For just before the Cata- 
 strophe the religious men and women, those 
 whom I should call religious," I said smiling, 
 " were almost few and desperate, except that 
 their faith told them to wait patiently. Our 
 leaders seemed unable to guide even them- 
 selves. There was trouble at St. Paul's, 
 where a Dean said, c No Christian can be a 
 pessimist,' and a Canon affirmed that c We of 
 the Church of England cannot be optimists.' 
 Here and there a voice would bravely plead 
 for a unity among the Christian churches — 
 Anglican, Nonconformist, and Roman — 
 temples of one Master's faith. The Quakers > 
 as always, remained consistent and Christ- 
 faithful. But while plain men and women 
 found few shepherds, and heard wise ethics 
 preached by Positivists and Theosophists and 
 Rationalists, it was hard to say why Christian 
 England was so un-Christian or what should 
 survive in Europe and the new World as a 
 living faith for stern men and tender women, 
 29 
 
The TOWER 
 
 a fire to keep example alive which goes out 
 if not communicated, a gentle force nourish- 
 ing virtue which will else be starved, and wed- 
 ding humility to devotion which without it 
 must become pride. And yet- " 
 
 " Yes ? " said the Priest. 
 
 " Why," said I, " I do remember that in 
 the War-time, as if to redeem us from some 
 of its horror, there was everywhere at home 
 a kind of welling-up of little kindly and civil 
 acts and thoughts — men and women, half con- 
 scious of their boys' sacrifice abroad, almost 
 surprising themselves into courtesy, for- 
 bearance, helpfulness, so that, if you will 
 understand me, the opposite acts were re- 
 marked and rebuked, being rare." 
 
 " Yes," said the other, and I saw that, while 
 erect, he was an old man and wise. " I think 
 I know, for I remember — I was hurt in Flan- 
 ders, badly at Hollebeke east of Ypres, bomb- 
 ing a blockhouse, and came home invalid, and 
 after a while, like many others, as you know, 
 perhaps, became a priest to see if I could 
 help." He paused, as if remembering some 
 things renounced, but not sadly. " I knew- 
 what the return from the warfare would in- 
 volve — a stream of weary, eager, struggling, 
 broken men, and it nearly deluged and dis- 
 mayed us at one time, only the women were 
 splendid. . . . 
 
 " But I must not keep you. I only mean 
 30 
 
The TOWER 
 
 that, somehow and how else than by the 
 grace of God, the divine impulse was, as ever, 
 at work, what both Darwin and Newman 
 believed in. We were bound to have it, and 
 it was our part to direct it right, for the hearts 
 of men and women were full of it, and not 
 even the formalists and the pedants, 55 and T 
 saw this priest-soldier 5 s eyes brighten, " could 
 stay it. 55 
 
 " And how, 55 I said, " do you mean ? 55 
 
 " Well, briefly, that after the purging of 
 the war-time and the dreadful scars which men 
 endured, our society was thirsty for the com- 
 fort and conciliation which, socially, can only 
 come enduringly from religion. In so great 
 a welter of the provisional and the relative, 
 something absolute and permanent was man's 
 greatest need. And the religious impulse 
 which alone could have enabled us to do what 
 has been done (ah ! I think you have not seen 
 it yet, but you will), drove us all to see that it 
 is religion which is the affirmation of abso- 
 lute values, and, as Brock put it in our time, 
 when it becomes fully conscious, the affirma- 
 tion of the absolute value of God Himself. 55 
 
 " But, 55 I asked, " did the community, folk 
 in general, find this out and hold by it ? 55 
 
 " Yes, indeed; indeed they did, as they were 
 
 bound to. I cannot tell you the whole story, 
 
 but I cannot too thankfully assure you that it 
 
 came from within and not from without. Of 
 
 3? 
 
The TOWER 
 
 course wise teaching helped. Parliament was 
 so busy that it was sensibly persuaded to give 
 the Church power to legislate on all matters 
 affecting the Church, subject to Parliament- 
 ary veto, and so we remodelled all her frame- 
 work, nine new Provinces, divided into old 
 and new dioceses, and the offences of * fat ' 
 and vendible livings abolished. The Psalter, 
 at least for public services, dropped many 
 offensive and cruel psalms, and received a 
 welcome correction of old blemishes, as in the 
 lovely 23rd and that more familiar song of 
 pilgrimage, the 95th. The Prayer Book, 
 three centuries old, received new prayers and 
 hymns and litanies, apt for new realms of 
 thought and new occupations of life. Our 
 priesthood, immensely more tolerant and free, 
 was not afraid to preach the Christ in every 
 stone and tree, in Athene and in Amida too. 
 If Jesus was born in Syria, he might, as some 
 said, have been born in China or in Gaul, and 
 would have used the same secret and method, 
 but with the phrases and parables of another 
 people. By thus ministering to a most de- 
 sirable freedom and variety, the living past 
 has been saved for the future. Rich tradi- 
 tions of order and forms have been preserved 
 without damage to the eager spirit of inquiry 
 and to that faith in progressive revelation 
 which makes religion for the truly religious 
 man an adventure — -an adventure, and not the 
 .32 
 
The TOWER 
 
 rather mean investment which our forefathers, 
 in their pathetic blindness, made of it." 
 
 " And so you mean that this Holy Place is 
 really the voice of the people ? " I asked in 
 wonder. 
 
 " Yes, I mean that, 55 he gratefully replied. 
 " They have found what Mazzini knew, that 
 bare ethics was not enough, that no morality 
 can endure or bring forth life, without a 
 heaven and dogma to support it, 55 and his 
 eyes wandered to the dome and the screen 
 beneath it. " Yes, I think it was in a letter 
 to a dear friend that the great Italian depre- 
 cated too much self-analysis, *■ thinking too 
 much of our salvation. Let God think of it. 
 Love Him in a simple, unexacting, unscrutin- 
 ising way, as a child his mother. 5 To work 
 and worship together in such love is, simply, 
 our creed — whether our ideals are those of the 
 First or the Sixteenth or the Twentieth Cen- 
 tury ! Our laity, thanks be to God 5 s power, 
 see that now for themselves, and hardly need 
 our craft. Society is more complex than ever. 
 Our long history grows daily longer. And 
 our Church, as she should, keeps her bounds 
 ever wider and wider in the search for God 
 and for what Green of Oxford called that 
 eternal relationship between God and man 
 bringing a new insight into the things of God 
 and a new energy of love." 
 
 We stood in silence, as he knew that, to my 
 33 
 
 D 
 
The TOWER 
 shame, I was not quite credulous. The morn- 
 ing sun streamed in and through the open 
 doors came the hum of traffic. Quietly a few 
 citizens were entering for brief worship on 
 their way to work. 
 
 " Believe me," said this man of comfort 
 and experience, as he took me by the hand, 
 " you will find on your journey in our hap- 
 pier island that I have told you the truth. 
 You will not find Utopia, which is Nowhere. 
 You will still find men and women, with their 
 loves and passions, their envies and their 
 zeals, their joys and their griefs, their qualities 
 and traits more varied than the sands of the 
 shore. You will find public and private life 
 as complex and wonderful as ever. Even the 
 Catastrophe was only an episode. The great 
 drama goes on and on. But I think you will 
 find the life a whole tone richer, stamped with 
 a character more just and healthy, and our 
 island thus happier. Yes; I behold England 
 as a Tower in the deep, a strong place upon 
 which a banner floats in the breezes that come 
 from the encircling sea; a Tower with bridges 
 for access to its treasured wisdom, gates and 
 doorways for the carrying of counsel and help, 
 a Tower under whose walls a juster indus- 
 trialism employs the thousands of our workers, 
 and across whose broad uplands and wide 
 forests a vigorous peasantry once more lives 
 with nature in the fear of God, so that our 
 34 
 
The TOWER 
 
 land is envied and praised beyond the seas." 
 " And shall I see this England ? " said I. 
 " Yes, I think you will. God speed you," 
 
 he said. 
 
 And I left him, heartened for my journey. 
 
 35 
 
t^»t^> tffi* t^> t^> t^> t^> t^» t^> t^> t^> t^> trf^ t^> t^> t^» t^> t^> 
 
 §V. A JUSTER INDUSTRIALISM 
 
 t^lt^) C^> C^> t^> t^» t^ t^> t^i t^> t^> t^> t^> t^> t^> L&* t^> t^> 
 
 AS I walked Westminster way by 
 the river I could not but linger 
 with relief to watch thephysical life 
 on the tide, the lighters which still, 
 as in my own proper day and in that 
 older time when Dr. Johnson and the ferry-boy 
 spoke of Argonauts, and further back still in 
 i he days of Queen Bess, carried merchandise 
 along the stream. The Chapel and the Priest 
 had been deeply moving, and my spirit was 
 hardly prepared. I should take my time. . . . 
 I had made some slip of judgment in think- 
 ing that I should grasp the new Revolution in 
 Industry which was my quest without gaug- 
 ing its sanction, the soul of its success. 
 For, not unnaturally, I seemed, cautiously, 
 to expect only some faint and slow remedies 
 for the old labour-strife. The very river re- 
 called that nice saying of old Selden : 
 
 In a troubled state we must do as in foul weather 
 upon the Thames, not think to cut directly through, 
 so that the boat may be quickly full of water, but rise 
 and fall as the waves do, give as much as conveniently 
 we can — 
 
 and yet the cheerful countenances and zestful 
 gait of the workers whom I saw about me 
 promised some deeper fulfilment of my hope. 
 
 36 
 
The TOWER 
 
 I hardly know how to convey to you a just 
 notion of their state — the healthier looks, the 
 springing carriage of their limbs, the easy 
 camaraderie of the sexes (like children in a 
 co-educational school grown big), a pervading 
 but quite unobtrusive sense of fellow-citizen- 
 ship such as they must have had in old Athens 
 when there was only one kind of seat in the 
 People's Theatre, saving those of the Priests 
 of Dionysus. Their dress matched their 
 moods. Aware of a great change, you hardly 
 touched its meaning unless you could, curi- 
 ously, finger its quality — the finer cloth and 
 sensible cutting of the men's garb, their tunics 
 and knee-breeches, no stranger to me than the 
 odd Victorian modes would have been to a 
 visitor from Chaucer's or Shakespeare's day; 
 the pretty richness and varied elegance of the 
 gowns which the women and maidens wore 
 who were out at this hour of the morning. I 
 had seen a foretaste of it all in the clothes of 
 my host's children, little reckoning that their 
 elders also shared the comfort and sanity of 
 good workmanship and quality in their dress, 
 reflecting a social cleanliness in their neat 
 spruceness, their metal ornaments and jewel- 
 lery few and good as in Holbein's portraits, 
 only more popular. 
 
 But I was only so aware of all this as to 
 recollect it later, as a kind of product from the 
 great and deep changes which the day taught 
 37 
 
The TOWER 
 
 me. My card showed me that I was over-due 
 for my appointment at the Ministry of 
 Commerce. 
 
 The officer who received me gave me the air 
 of a college friend of my own youth grown 
 middle-aged in the Civil Service (as we used 
 to call it), but without that too early loss of 
 freshness and idealism which came from exces- 
 sive scholarship-hunting. 
 
 " You come, I believe, sir," he said, " on a 
 visit from an earlier time, and I little know 
 what you expect to find in our Labour 
 arrangements." 
 
 " I am now wise enough," said I, " to 
 expect only what I shall see. In my day there 
 was outward chaos to the eye — State control 
 in unexpected places, plunderous profiteering 
 in the essentials of life, well-meaning pro- 
 moters of profit-sharing schemes, syndicalism 
 and ugly threats of sabotage, co-partnership 
 efforts yielding to ulterior motives and salved 
 with difficulty, charters for 'conscription of 
 wealth and £i a day, 5 the National Guild 
 builders, the prevailing joint stock companies 
 for purchasing labour at what a managing 
 teemsman could secure it for, the little private 
 trades, the small workshops! Do you have 
 them all still ? Or did some good increasing 
 purpose survive and bring a measure of order 
 out of it all?" 
 
 I almost hung upon his answer, for I had 
 
 38 
 
The TOWER 
 wondered for what the fearful price of the 
 War-catastrophe had been paid. He seemed 
 to divine my meaning and answered me a little 
 cautiously. 
 
 " I hope that you will not think that we 
 have organised one panacea — secured a big, 
 dull, uniform formula for all production. 
 Thank Humanity, we have not achieved that 
 yet," said this Bright-witted public servant. 
 
 I was not really disappointed and tried to 
 show my relief, whereat he smiled. 
 
 " It is a long story, 55 he went on, " and of 
 course I just do not remember the War myself, 
 but recognise your own description from my 
 reading. Are you free to spend the day wi th me ? ' 
 
 "How?" said I. 
 
 " I mean that you came a little late, and as 
 we have only a small staff here in the Ministry 
 
 I cannot depute my errand, which is at " 
 
 and he named one of the big Midland towns 
 which, if I may for once speak a hard word of 
 my own generation, had sinned notoriously in 
 sheer profit-seeking and hard bargain-driving. 
 " I leave in half an hour by the mail-van. 55 
 
 " By the mail- van ? 55 I queried. 
 
 " Yes, 55 he said. " They are state-coaches, 
 you see, well-equipped and rapid, so that at 
 any time a state-officer (and we only have some 
 hundreds where you had thousands) may ride 
 on one and take an accredited passenger for 
 company. Will you come ?" 
 
 39 
 
The TOWER 
 " Indeed I will," I answered readily. 
 " And then I can tell you the tale and per- 
 haps answer your queries, and, if I dispose of 
 my business with the Trade Council easily, as 
 I expect, will show you the labour shops on the 
 
 As we sped up and out of London on to the 
 Great North Road, my companion, when we 
 were free from the thicker traffic and the car's 
 engines were running well, told me a tale of 
 interest — the more so because it was not a set 
 tale, neither a Report nor a Theory, good as 
 those may be in their places. 
 
 " Yes, this car is a good product. You see, 
 it really is not empty island-boasting to say 
 that the British artisan remains the finest 
 craftsman in the world, especially as he nowa- 
 days has regained so much liberty to obey his 
 instincts. < He will make good things 
 supremely well; evil things he will reject ' — 
 that's broadly true, and was well said. 
 
 " Of course, the great chance came with the 
 ending of the War. Perhaps God meant it so ! 
 — I am not a theologian. I mean, the terrible 
 destruction by the warfare and the absorption 
 of non-fighting labour into making the myriad 
 means of that destruction, emptied the stocks 
 and supplies of the world's made things. 
 Those were big and potent facts which I be- 
 lieve they hardly realised at the time — and 
 40 
 
The TOWER 
 
 little wonder, with the world such a hell, 
 Justice and Liberty walking, as the brave 
 Irishman said, almost on bare feet, over its 
 flaming coals. . . . 
 
 " Those were big facts, I say. And another 
 was the very right arid proper un-dilution of 
 labour which came after the War. At one end 
 the old workers (all honour to them for the 
 added toil which they had taken on in the 
 workshops at home) were pensioned earlier, 
 first at sixty-five and now at sixty." 
 
 I showed my surprise. 
 
 " It is humane. Yes, generally it is 
 economic as well— the army of industry, like 
 any other army, can travel no faster than its 
 slowest arm, and, to speak frankly, why should 
 society deny to an engine-driver or a printer 
 what it used to claim from a schoolmaster and 
 a civil servant ? But, above all, it is humane 
 and rational, especially if you make the pen- 
 sion voluntary and various, as the Danes saw 
 and did long ago." 
 
 We drew slow and careful at some cross- 
 roads and then sped on. 
 
 " At the other end (as perhaps you know ?) 
 the return of the soldiers and sailors was the 
 opportunity for the boys and girls, and we 
 were wise enough to make Parliament seize it. 
 The far-reaching evils of the too early em- 
 ployment of children — your lad of fifteen in 
 a grinding office or wasted on a van's tail- 
 
 41 
 
The TOWER 
 
 board, the little maids of England become 
 premature women in factory life — were 
 terrible, the harder to check because the bonds 
 of the slavery were invisible, intangible. 
 Routine, strife, excitement, and routine — all 
 enemies to the joy of youth, the expansion of 
 soul, body, and mind, the discovery of special 
 aptitude and capacity. God be praised that 
 we caught His better wisdom at that time and 
 that our leaders were listened to." 
 
 "And with what result?" I asked, much 
 stirred by this brief narrative of such big- 
 matters. " Do you mean you have achieved 
 some industrial paradise by such surgery?" 
 
 " Hardly," said he. " We are still human, 
 and sinners too ! I suppose we shall be terribly 
 dull when we are all saints. But, seriously, 
 the fabric of a new and better industrial order 
 has been achieved. I am sure of it, and I feel 
 you, stranger, will be even more conscious of 
 it than we who live with it daily. Come, you 
 have let me do all the talking. How would 
 you guess that we have achieved what I ask 
 you to believe?" 
 
 I suppose that I was too wise to answer 
 hastily or with any certain, single guess. 
 Presently I said : 
 
 " Industrial reform had many friends in my 
 
 day, and they differed wonderfully in their 
 
 counsels. Some worked for the millennium, 
 
 some for next week. Some fixed their faith, 
 
 42 
 
The TOWER 
 
 and with good reason, in small workshops 
 where, as for fine, strong furniture or good 
 clothing, the producer met his consumer across 
 the bench or counter. Some, with good 
 reason, too, declared that economy in the pur- 
 chase of materials and the disposing of pro- 
 ducts was, as for electric lamps, pencils, and a 
 thousand articles, test attained by large factory 
 organisation, what you might call the princi- 
 palities and powers of Industry, with the 
 Rulers and the Governed and a goodly com- 
 pany of Managing Officers — if only you could 
 avoid promotion parasites and their expenses. 
 And then, after the manner of our country- 
 men, with even more disputation, in our 
 British fashion, about the Names than the 
 Things themselves, there would be the con- 
 tinual debate about Capital and Labour — lead- 
 ing off into the weighing of the respective 
 merits and defects of Partnership and Profit- 
 sharing, with a curious bye-quarrel engendered 
 by some unhappy second meaning earned for 
 the primarily honest label of Co-Partnership 
 itself ! Indeed, I would like to know the out- 
 come of it all, for, like yourself, I know that 
 the time we speak of was big with change and 
 large movements close to the birth. 55 
 
 "Well? 55 he said. 
 
 " I mean that Morris himself, whom folks 
 charged with an idle hankering after the days 
 of Chaucer, knew well that, however grate- 
 
 43 
 
The TOWER 
 
 fully we would like that happier time to 
 return, it was our business to march breast 
 forward with what the world now offered — 
 that men cannot all play St. Francis or Thoreau 
 in Walden. As the records of your Ministry, 
 indeed, your own school-books, if they are 
 sensible, will have told you, the century end- 
 ing with the Catastrophe was, as regards the 
 fields of our home-labour, in both town and 
 countryside, a theatre of strange antagonism, 
 coercion and resistance. It was marked chiefly 
 by the strangest anomalies of wealth and 
 poverty in all the outward aspects of life. In- 
 wardly, its character was that of prolonged and 
 ill-suppressed bitterness of class-estrangement, 
 an odd falling-away in religion, an extravagant 
 fever for luxuries, redeemed by the courage of 
 most of the poor and the charity of some of 
 the rich, saved by the divine in everything 
 human." 
 
 " And do you attribute the War to that, as 
 a kind of explosion or outbreak of the 
 malady ? " said my companion. 
 
 " Frankly, I do not know. I am rather 
 concerned with the symptoms. We were all 
 terribly ill at ease with a dozen remedies, 
 rather than consciously preventing the malady. 
 Strikes and threats of strikes were becoming 
 the condition of all labour difficulty. Threats 
 of stupid sabotage and "ca' canny," and almost 
 a chronic interference of Parliament which 
 44 
 
The TOWER 
 would have been humorous if it had not been 
 so paralysing — a baffling kind of control by 
 anxious and well-meaning politicians, who, 
 without intending it, and to the impotent dis- 
 may of their victims, made a prey of Labour, 
 so that the working men of England not un- 
 naturally caught a big distrust of politics." 
 
 " It was not only natural," said my State- 
 officer friend, who had obviously earned his 
 post by insight and acumen, " it was rational. 
 The blunder which Labour made as the Nine- 
 teenth Century closed and even later was to 
 put political before economical power. The 
 mistake was all the worse a blunder for being 
 made when the religious impulses of our social 
 life had ebbed very low." 
 
 " Well," I asked, " will you now tell me the 
 outcome ? Did the big factories win or the 
 little workshops ? " 
 
 " Both," he said, " and I think you will 
 guess what happened if I tell you that the 
 larger co-operative concerns came first, and 
 out of them, the desirable small shops you will 
 find in plenty." 
 
 " How do you mean ? " I asked, puzzled. 
 
 " With what your generation had produced 
 you would hardly expect to find the giant 
 factories slain by the little shops in a day. 
 After all, David's pebble at Goliath was a 
 lucky accident! We were unlikely to win 
 back at a bound to so simple an idea, and for 
 
 45 
 
The TOWER 
 
 some of life's obvious necessities, coal and 
 milk, for instances, and for trades like trans- 
 port and engineering, other formulas will be 
 essential. But the real solvent of industrial 
 strife which we seem to have found was what 
 produced happier and more contented 
 labourers. Happier labourers meant men and 
 women readier to make even simple good 
 things of a high standard, away from the stunt- 
 ing and deadening influences of processes and 
 divided industries, things more lasting and 
 with a sounder quality acceptable to shrewd 
 consumers. It meant that those who produced 
 were readier to take the risks of the adventure 
 of themselves selling what they fashioned in 
 actual contact with those that wanted their pro- 
 ducts. Yes, that was the key — freedom to 
 enjoy risks, not a slavery to avoid them; and a 
 freedom amid pleasanter surroundings of 
 homes and leisure. Why, it meant art or work - 
 pleasure once more restored to industry. It 
 meant a kind of instinct in people, no longer 
 chained in unseen shackles to painful overtime 
 work for a living wage, for doing the best they 
 could with the work in hand, for making 
 bread, boots, chairs, printing, and all else ex- 
 cellent of its kind." 
 
 " You surely do not mean," I asked, almost 
 incredulously, " that what Morris prophesied 
 has actually come about ? I seem to remember 
 something very like that." 
 
 4 6 
 
The TOWER 
 
 " Indeed I do — for I suppose I was quoting 
 him from memory, that man whom his friend 
 called c a rock of defence to us all and a castle 
 on the top of it, and a banner on the top of 
 that.' " 
 
 " You have not told me how it came about," 
 I eagerly questioned. " Was it by Act of Par- 
 liament ? " I said, foolishly enough. 
 
 " Gra'mercy, no ! " chuckled my friend. 
 " The quality of industrial justice is not 
 strained. It comes gently, along the runnels 
 of mutual confidence, welling up from the 
 fountains of decency and fairness and good- 
 will. Of course, as you may believe, those 
 springs sometimes get poisoned by envy and 
 greed, the channels choked by sloth and in- 
 fidelity. But in the main we have, since the 
 Catastrophe purged us and gave us a new 
 wisdom with the fear of God, achieved in very 
 great measure an intimate and continuous 
 association of management and labour — 
 greater, if less heroic, than the brotherhood in 
 the awful trenches of that ordeal by battle 
 with which our champions redeemed 
 calamity." 
 
 " Association," I said. " You mean part- 
 nership, after all ? " 
 
 " Well, yes, in a sense; but partnership is at 
 
 best a vague term when you apply it to more 
 
 than two or three human spirits. We haven't 
 
 invented a better Word than Association for 
 
 47 
 
The TOWER 
 
 signifying all that the alliance of all in an 
 industry aims at." 
 
 " That aim ? " I queried. 
 
 " The aim, if you look at it steadily and 
 honestly, is simple enough. It always has 
 been, though so often lost in dust of strife and 
 mists of fraud. There was a straight question 
 put in our time by a Judge, an eminent lawyer, 
 who with a curiously lucid and incisive mind 
 had himself taken a leading part in the formu- 
 lation and practice of the law of joint-stock 
 companies. This was Buckley, who became 
 Lord Wrenbury, and when the public were 
 sick with anxiety and dread about the antagon- 
 ism between Capital and Labour, stated openly 
 that it was principally because while both em- 
 ployer and employed contribute to production, 
 the thing produced belonged to the employer 
 to the exclusion of the employed — a fact, as 
 he explained, that lay at the root of all in- 
 dustrial discontent." 
 
 " Yes," I said; " I remember. And I expect 
 it must have been a familiar, haunting thought 
 to him and any others, judges, lawyers, and 
 clerks of any imagination, who either had to 
 do with the promotion schemes and the big 
 * nominal capital ' of commissions and dis- 
 counts and other so-called services that were 
 superadded to the actual, necessary capital of 
 money, machinery and material, or, on Tues- 
 days in the Law Courts, attended at the 
 48 
 
The TOWER 
 obsequies of wound-up companies without 
 much thought of the discharged labourers 
 themselves." 
 
 " I think it went further than that," said 
 my companion, with the air of a man whose 
 intelligence read deep. " As we have come 
 round to a better time I won't waste words 
 or blame about absentee-employers or the 
 slavery of Capital — and, after all, sarcasm 
 never pays in a world that is meant to be cheer- 
 ful and full of good spirits. But, broadly put, 
 the deplorable result of the last century's in- 
 ventions in finance meant that men and women 
 who had funds which they inherited or saved 
 or gained, virtually surrendered their control 
 of the quota which they invested in a vast and 
 complicated system. Small quantities were 
 contributed to huge funds. But far over their 
 heads great financial houses floated loans or 
 dealt in great Modes of shares. Banks turned 
 on the taps of cash into concerns whose sound- 
 ness was not measured in terms of honesty or 
 fair dealing. Insurance corporations built up 
 huge reserves of property, hoping thus to 
 abolish risks and defy the blows of fortune. 
 The whole system (which bridged seas and 
 oceans so that you could have traced the rise 
 of prices in England to the frauds of Ameri- 
 can railway magnates) became too complex to 
 be grasped or controlled. Stockbrokers, 
 occupied with the mere business of transfer- 
 
 49 
 
The TOWER 
 
 ring the contributions of the amateur investor 
 to the working Capitalist, became, let us hope 
 unconsciously, the agents of a very dark 
 Power ! Few either outside or within an in- 
 surance society really knew whether its funds 
 were invested in industries whose labour was 
 underpaid, or its prosperity based on profits a 
 larger share of which, in natural justice, 
 belonged to the labourer. Your shipping firms 
 might treat their men fairly, but were they 
 carrying and distributing sweated goods? 
 You cannot deny such broad statements, or 
 that, to be quite honest, they involved a vast 
 moral problem — a question, that is, of men, 
 women, and children versus balance sheets and 
 dividends. And, fortunately, just before the 
 World-catastrophe, the huge fallacy was 
 realised just in so far as the People were edu- 
 cated (which is why Russia brought her liberty 
 to birth with such slow and tortuous agony) 
 
 "Yes, it was and always will be a moral 
 question. Your Lord Wrenbury knew it 
 when he declared that that man would have 
 solved the problem who found the way to give 
 the unemployed upon commercial principles a 
 share and interest in the thing produced, and 
 sounded Labour's own death-knell to the 
 Freedom-to-buy-and-sell-labour which the old 
 * Industrial Revolution ' had claimed and prac- 
 tised." 
 
 5° 
 
The TOWER 
 
 " This," I said, beginning to see the drift of 
 his argument, which certainly accorded well 
 with the busy and cheerful aspect of the new 
 towns and the revived country-side through 
 which we sped, " is a Big matter." 
 
 " Of course it is," said he. " It is the big 
 matter for our life as a society — everything 
 between bread-and-butter and religion, and 
 those included, is involved in it." 
 
 " Do you mean that there are no longer any 
 financial houses or banks or insurance com- 
 panies ? " I asked. 
 
 " No, but they are wonderfully different, 
 and all brought very much nearer to the 
 sources of Production and the workshops of 
 Labour, and in that sense the c commercial 
 principles ' stated in the Wrenbury formula 
 (for which he was unfairly suspected by some 
 of his intransigeant critics) have been, as they 
 were bound to be, observed." 
 
 " I suppose you mean that mere profit-shar- 
 ing and co-partnery have not sufftced ? " 
 
 " No. They were, as your generation tried 
 them, palliatives at the best, and here and there 
 a fraud. Owen and Maurice (all honour to them 
 for declaring war on the mere steam-engine 
 capitalist hammer!) began these palliatives, 
 with good intentions but feeble results. They 
 miscalculated the mobility of both capital and 
 artisan-intelligence. They under-estimated 
 the dominant values of the human element 
 
 5* 
 
The TOWER 
 
 in associated labour. The wholly special basis 
 of the State-regulated gas companies was an 
 exception to prove the rule that l a gift from 
 the employer ' is not < a share and interest in 
 the thing produced,' and, with a fatal iteration 
 in one form or another, the return for extra 
 exertions stipulated in co-partnership schemes 
 was found to be determined by factors over 
 which the employed had no control or was 
 frustrated by the removal or death of the 
 worker. It was heart-breaking to entirely dis- 
 interested advocates of profit-sharing to find 
 the forces of a commercialism based on the 
 unmoral system of your century too much for 
 them. But while daring to begin on the right 
 lines, they lacked the courage to go far 
 enough. Labour wanted the full volume of 
 their intellectual support — to discover that 
 freedom is a vain thing without economic 
 power. Only by a real responsibility based on 
 economic power (not by being allowed a few 
 shares among thousands) was Labour — the 
 mass, that is, of skilled and unskilled artisans 
 — likely to rise to a sense of liability against 
 loss and fluctuations. Charged with this re- 
 sponsibility, and wisely directed in their sense 
 of it, workers have come to have no use for 
 envy and injured feelings and all that Revolt 
 feeds on. The new social contract is one to 
 which a valuation of human life and the spirit 
 of freedom have been restored. The change 
 52 
 
The TOWER 
 is the outcome of a moral revolution, and, if 
 you like, the War certainly helped to engender 
 it." 
 
 " Then I suppose you mean that Trade 
 Unionism did become Industrial Union- 
 ism ? " I asked. " I remember the beginning 
 of the tide, and how it came in by unexpected 
 channels." 
 
 " Yes, in a great measure it is that," he 
 replied, " although naturally many workers, 
 especially the more artistic craftsmen, who 
 under the welcome new industrial freedom 
 have increased in numbers, hold out for their 
 own independence both in production and in 
 marketing. But the large industries, from 
 transport and mining to cotton-spinning and 
 potteries, are each organised in their own 
 National Guilds as a kind of true equipoise to 
 the State, sixteen or seventeen of them in all, 
 and not over a hundred trades, as of old. 
 Each Guild includes all workers of every 
 grade in the industry it covers, co-operating 
 with the State as the seat of spiritual functions 
 for the benefit of the community as a whole, 
 but based on voluntary organisation and 
 democratic management. And above all, as 
 the Guild, by democratic vote, decides the 
 conditions of labour and the hours of work 
 upon a basis of mutuality suitable for its own 
 trade, it is responsible for the material wel- 
 fare of its members, and indeed solves the 
 
 S3 
 
The TOWER 
 
 problem of unemployment by preventing it." 
 " Will you tell me what you mean, for I 
 suppose capital funds are as much wanted as 
 ever, and I am eager to know what has hap- 
 pened to all the middle-class investors who 
 were born in the nineteenth century. 55 
 
 " I will tell you something after we have 
 walked about Chesterfield to stretch our legs 
 a little, for we shall stop here a while, and we 
 shall be pretty weary, body and mind, by our 
 journey 5 s end. To-morrow I advise you to 
 walk round the New Town at Skipton. I 
 have to return myself. 55 
 
 It was a Saturday afternoon, and I was 
 aware once more of a new and at first in- 
 definable zest in the exposed citizenship of 
 the place, akin to what I have felt in London. 
 Here, of course, the life of the dwellers was 
 much more directly against a productive 
 background. The very dress of the workers 
 showed it; their hands, as I observed, were 
 those of enginemen, cokemen, mechanics, and 
 all the other followers, whether at the face or 
 in the pits, of the calling which in a coalfield 
 wins the " black diamonds 55 of industry. 
 They were the men whom, with varying racial 
 characteristics, I had known in the England of 
 my own time from Durham through to Wales, 
 but their countenances and the gait and cheer- 
 fulness of their womenfolk and the children 
 were such as I bitterly remembered never to 
 54 
 
The TOWER 
 have seen in those ruined and hideous mis- 
 housed and slavish hordes among the South 
 Welsh valleys of my day. . . . 
 
 " You must know," said my guide, " that 
 this huge coal industry has not only been put 
 on a new economic basis. That, of course, 
 was the natural outcome of the rights which 
 the miners secured from Parliament in your 
 time — like the right to conduct their own 
 case collectively at inquiries upon colliery 
 disasters and the right to appoint checkway- 
 men and even visiting inspectors." 
 
 " Why, yes," I said, " I do remember that 
 here in Derbyshire the men even persuaded 
 the private owners to set up a joint committee 
 with power to deal not only with absenteeism 
 but also with questions of discipline and 
 management." 
 
 " Truly," he said, " and you shall hear of 
 the logical outcome of that. But, first, I do 
 want you to know something a little startling, 
 that you may understand to what the new 
 ownership and working of the mines are 
 directed. Broadly, not a scuttle of the 
 precious stuff is burned in a British house- 
 hold." 
 
 He smiled at my incredulous looks. 
 
 " The trained intelligence that came into the 
 
 working by miners of these State-owned mines 
 
 saw to that. Science has told us that coal is 
 
 much too valuable to be burned as it used to be. 
 
 S5 
 
The TOWER 
 
 Science has taught us to win from it carbonic 
 and picric acids, paraffin and naphthaline, ben- 
 zine, toluene and pitch, ammonium sulphate 
 and phosphate for fertilisers, even soot for 
 printing inks and polishes, as well as for 
 manures. A whole host of lesser trades de- 
 pend for their raw material on coal. The 
 coal seams of the country have been surveyed 
 and classified for this end, and the practical 
 problems of carbonising and gasifying the 
 raw materials for obtaining those by-products 
 and leaving the result available for heat and 
 light and power have been tackled by the 
 chemists and engineers." 
 
 I am no chemist, but my mind, steadying 
 itself, saw into the realities of this tale of 
 mineralogical and chemical magic. 
 
 " You should see the works themselves to 
 understand it," he ran on. " This and our 
 other towns do, in fact, as municipalities, car- 
 bonise the bulk of the coal to supply them- 
 selves with electric light and energy as uni- 
 versally and cheaply as water." 
 
 " I must take it from you," I said. " And 
 what is the economic arrangement of 
 mining ? " 
 
 " Well," said he, as he lifted another slice 
 of fresh warm toast from the electric grill in 
 the restaurant where we were sitting, " the 
 problem here was how to produce coal for 
 these uses both for the miners themselves and 
 
The TOWER 
 the community of which they were a big part, 
 and incidentally how to remove the causes of 
 quarrels between management and labour 
 and efface the rivalries between the sections of 
 those engaged in a vital industry. Of course, 
 it was primarily a moral matter." 
 
 " You mean the treatment of the employed 
 by the employer?" I asked, and as I asked it 
 I saw how small my view was. 
 
 " That," said he, " but much more than 
 that. The problem travelled deep round 
 the roots of property and profiteering, and in- 
 volved the questions of avoiding exploitation 
 of the State by the miners and of the miners 
 by the State, as well as the equitable handling 
 of the claims of the present generation of 
 private ownership. 
 
 " The solution is not complete yet — is it 
 likely? But you will remember that even 
 before the War-catastrophe was closed 
 down, Labour quietly achieved a momentous 
 internal revolution. At first, the Labour 
 leaders made the slip of putting prime stress 
 on mere political reform. But then they 
 achieved the much more potent process of 
 associating the forces of Defensive Unionism 
 and Productive Co-operation. In this min- 
 ing industry, for instance, they linked up the 
 distinctive unions of the particular craftsmen 
 into one Guild for the industry as a whole. 
 They did it by means of sectional representa- 
 
 57 
 
The TOWER 
 tion and a system of transferable cards for use 
 between the different occupations of work 
 in the pits and at the face, so that deputies 
 and surfacemen, enginemen and mechanics, 
 coal-hewers and cokemen were no longer kept 
 apart by silly rivalries or petty jealousies, 
 engineered by the cupidity of the more selfish 
 employers or the anxiety of inferior officials. 
 Thus they achieved, internally, the power of 
 organizing the whole industry, a national in- 
 dustry if ever there was one, so as to pro- 
 duce a maximum output of coal for the use 
 of the general community of consumers, at 
 prices fixed by that community. And they 
 achieved it by establishing the new kind of 
 partnership which was, for these large indus- 
 tries, the method of these Guilds." 
 
 " The new partnership, I suppose, means 
 with the State ? " 
 
 " Yes," said my friend, smiling, " I see 
 your mind accepts the logical result." 
 
 " Well," said I, " it does seem logical, but 
 in human affairs I know so well that logic is 
 too often akin to pedantry and the dogmas of 
 the doctrinaire. In my time the Fabians 
 were full of such logic and were constantly 
 found tripping into theoretical ponds and 
 ditches of their own devising." 
 
 " I grant that," said this humorous State- 
 officer. " But," he reflected, " if you think 
 upon it, that would be due to the sudden 
 
 58 
 
The TOWER 
 
 impact of intellectual support against an un- 
 stable fabric of manual labour and wage- 
 slavery. Anyhow, mind and matter were in 
 labour together, and in this mining which we 
 talk of, because here, this afternoon, this town 
 before our eyes is made of it, the partnership 
 with the State was consummated. The State, 
 and not the miners, pays the interest on the 
 purchase-money with which the soil and plant 
 owners were bought out. The State thus 
 owns the means of production, but the mines 
 are controlled and worked by the central 
 federating Guild of the Mining Industry. 
 That central Guild, as a national body, has 
 distinct functions. It adjusts the re- 
 lations of itself with the State and of 
 itself with other Guilds. It lays down the 
 general standards and rules of the industry. 
 It regulates production by its over-control 
 both as to qualities and amounts. It co- 
 ordinates supply and demand, so as to avoid 
 c profits ' and the exploitation of the rest of 
 the community by excessive charges. With 
 the State as such on the one hand and with 
 the whole body of Industrial Guilds on the 
 other, it agrees adjustable prices for the proper 
 payment of those working the industry and 
 the payment of a tax or rent to the State for 
 the use of the mines, which tax or rent has rela- 
 tion to the State outlay and government. These 
 are the functions of the two partners in the 
 59 
 
The TOWER 
 association, the Guild so concerned as you see 
 with policy and finance as to be the real seat 
 of economic power. Locally, in each colliery 
 district, there is, as is essential, considerable 
 local freedom for organizing the actual work 
 of production and arranging the myriad details 
 of pit-organization. . . . There, my friend, is 
 a narrative for you of a type-achievement of 
 our Revolution since the War." 
 
 My mind staggered a little at the blow, 
 and indeed I saw my companion's hand pass 
 across his own forehead, as if his own recoiled 
 a little from the effort of presenting afresh so 
 concentrated an image of a vast industrial 
 complex. 
 
 " Indeed," I said, " I appreciate your 
 trouble. And you mean that that is what 
 gives out this livelier folk of men and women 
 who look as if they lived and toiled (and 
 could even die) in fair contentment and good 
 spirits ? " 
 
 " That is so," said he. 
 
 " And I see not," I said, " why the system 
 should not be applied to a dozen big indus- 
 tries — railways, canals, forestry, and ship- 
 building." 
 
 " And so of course it is," said he. " And 
 now we must resume our journey. And, 
 with your leave, I think we will just keep our 
 eyes open for the evening run through a 
 beautiful countryside, and not be talking! " 
 - 60 
 
§VI. VILLAGE COMMUNITIES 
 
 t^> t^> t^> t^> t^> t^» t^» ttf>> t^» l^> t^> t^> K^> t^» t<^> t^» t^"> t^» 
 
 AS we sped on our way through a 
 district of Derbyshire where de- 
 licious villages are nestled among 
 high towering peaks and lovely 
 scenery the beauty of our land, as 
 of old, held me its willing captive. Where, to 
 an Englishman, is its equal in the wide world ? 
 The good building-stone and the skilled use of 
 it and of timber- work, now that craftsmen, who 
 were artists had come to work again, seemed 
 to have saved a tradition. The use and wont 
 of generations was in each village street. But 
 I am unlikely to forget the deep thrill of 
 pleasure which stirred my heart at the sight, 
 too rapid in this particular journey, of a new 
 Village Settlement which, as I learned later, 
 was but a pattern of many that came out of the 
 Catastrophe, so that I may here tell you of it. 
 
 It appears that, with the good sense and 
 generosity which mark our Briton at his best, 
 England and Scotland were not too dazecl by 
 the War to show gratitude to their disabled 
 heroes who, emulating those wonderful 
 Frenchmen and inspiring the stout-hearted 
 champions from America, saved the world, by 
 tragedy, from a hideous scourge of misgovern- 
 ment. 
 
 61 
 
The TOWER 
 
 For the thousands of noble dead and pitiful 
 permanently crippled, hundreds of thousands 
 were disabled by the damage of modern war- 
 fare's machinery and chemistry. The physique 
 of fine men and growing lads, the flower of 
 the race, was hurt and maimed and sapped and 
 broken in a hundred ways; no need to harp on 
 the long tale of calamitous suffering. . . . 
 Eager to recover, wistful to resume life's 
 decent occupations, often prone (let the truth 
 be told) to slacken in endeavour under the 
 perilous competence of a merited pension, 
 these men who had endured terror by land and 
 sea and air had turned their backs on Warfare 
 and their breasts to the Future. And I learned 
 that their countrymen and countrywomen, 
 even while the Catastrophe still rocked 
 Europe, gave generous and wise compassion 
 to these broken, curable champions. Medical, 
 economic, and architectural skill gave them 
 these village settlements for healing each 
 man's damage with patient treatment and apt 
 training. In a congenial rural life was found 
 the best cure for their physical and mental ills. 
 Victims of Bellona's cruel surgery or her be- 
 wildering shell-shock, they found encourage- 
 ment and life — life soothing and satisfying, in 
 the escape out of the hard discipline required 
 for the Game of Princes into a comradeship 
 and friendly competition in their bodily and 
 mental recovery. Their entry into the ranks 
 62 
 
The TOWER 
 
 of agricultural and country life carried with it 
 something of the zest for a common purpose 
 of both hands and head which, in Flanders and 
 Mesopotamia, in Egypt and in France, or on 
 the oceans of the waters or the air, had held 
 officers and men together in War's own 
 peculiar association. Their aggregation in the 
 Villages was merciful, to speed their recovery. 
 Wisdom mingled many kinds of disablement 
 in each group. Older heads on sound-limbed 
 bodies ministered to their common prosperity. 
 The loving care of mothers, wives, and sisters 
 completed what the sweet, strong air of Nature 
 and medical skill left possible for their healing. 
 So that, as a visitor into a later day, I hap- 
 pened upon this cheerful village of busy occu- 
 pations which resembled so many of those 
 that I have presently to tell you of, only that 
 among the lithe-limbed folk — the sturdy 
 husbandmen and happy-featured women and 
 eager, budding children — I observed a few 
 veterans not pitiful and broken as after Water- 
 loo, but bravely careless of their injuries. The 
 countryside, even where the old villages and 
 hamlets had not become these curative centres, 
 but had simply been revitalised for the cultiva- 
 tion of Mother Earth and her fruit and crops, 
 was full of these happily mended warriors 
 become a new yeomen-peasantry of England, 
 craftsmen, farmers, and market-gardeners. 
 
 *3 
 
The TOWER 
 
 I should tell you that even close to the cities, 
 demanding always some southern, sunlit 
 vision of an open scene and clean breath of 
 unexhausted air, these Settlements or Colonies 
 had been beneficently founded. I later dis- 
 covered one on the western skirts of London, 
 where the holder of an honoured name of 
 nobility had adorned it by a princely gift of 
 land that ran from a mansion in a finely 
 timbered estate through orchards and gardens 
 to the broad, health-yielding tide of the 
 Thames. Here, healed by the aid of breezes 
 blown from Richmond Park and Surrey and 
 the perpetual beauty of the river which carried 
 the products of their workshops from little 
 docks and waterways cunningly contrived 
 against their homes, some two hundred of 
 these hurt men had been left settled with their 
 families, busy in small crafts suited to their 
 disability, and yet near, as men and women 
 would wish to be, to the stir and business of 
 the Town. And miles away, south-easterly, 
 across the great area of the Mother-City, I 
 found that the State itself, which in the War- 
 time had northwards created good housing for 
 the munition workers in an industry that only 
 the State should operate, had devoted Crown 
 lands to a like good use. Two prosperous 
 market - gardening and fruit farms, sur- 
 mounted by a bright village busy with little 
 trades suitable for Kentish customers, were 
 
 6 4 
 
The TOWER 
 set for ever to mark a green limit to London's 
 growth. Just above and in it, crowning a low 
 hill with walls that for five centuries — since 
 Caxton brought printing to these islands — 
 have carried a glorious roof of English wood- 
 work, the great hall of a Royal Palace, with 
 its gathered memories of tradition and inci- 
 dent, was become a kindling home of all that 
 music and the fine arts and friendly inter- 
 course could give to veterans whose abiding 
 frailty kept them sheltered in a neighbouring 
 Hospital. 
 
 I will only break my narrative further in 
 this side-story to tell you two things briefly. 
 
 It was still keenly remembered when I 
 visited the scene that the twelve or thirteen 
 hundred maimed or nervous men who were 
 originally treated in this medical colony, be- 
 fore it settled into a permanent village of 
 homes for the two hundred families, found 
 their recovery reinforced by some magic sense 
 that their future was fortified by a living past. 
 For on this very spot Edward III.'s prisoner 
 of war, King John of France, was entertained 
 as a guest and captivated his victor's daughter 
 for his bride; twenty years later Leo, King 
 of Armenia, " whose country and realms 
 were in danger to be conquered of the 
 Turks," came hither at Christmas to 
 search the aid of Christendom from 
 Richard II.; here Froissart tells us that 
 
 65 
 
The TOWER 
 he offered to that same Richard a book 
 " handsomely written and illuminated, and 
 bound in crimson velvet, with ten silver-gilt 
 studs and two large clasps of silver-gilt, richly- 
 worked with roses in the centre," and how the 
 King, learning that it treated " Of Love," and 
 dipping into it in several places, bade Sir 
 Richard Credon carry it to Tiis oratory; the 
 very Great Hall that stands here, a noble and 
 sound relic, was built by Edward IV. as part 
 of his Palace, while later Henry VIII. re- 
 moved his Court, to escape from the Plague 
 in London or give famous Christmas parties. 
 ... I was told that a schoolmaster who 
 went stout-heartedly to the warfare till his 
 nerves were shattered in the Battle of the 
 Somme, found himself here for therapeutic 
 treatment, and was prompted by a wise doctor 
 to explore the history of the place. The lore 
 of it became his medicine, and in all kinds of 
 curious little doses he imparted it to others. 
 He presently became the Steward of the 
 Hospital and Controller of the Great Hall, and 
 the whole community became his pupils in a 
 willing culture of their souls. 
 
 The further matter was that this Village 
 was a pattern of an old mode of industrialism 
 in somewise restored to England. You re- 
 member that Thorold Rogers traced how the 
 clearing of land-estates and the Enclosure 
 Acts caused a compulsory exodus from the 
 66 
 
The TOWER 
 
 villages, which divorced the healthy associa- 
 tion of small manual industries with the art 
 of agriculture. These new Village Settle- 
 ments appear to have restored that association 
 on new lines. It would have been romantic 
 but impracticable to bring back the happy, 
 self-contained village of Chaucer's or Shake- 
 speare's time. But the special stimulus for 
 rejecting the big factory system and a clever 
 capture of the motor and heating aids of elec- 
 tricity combined to reach the old result in 
 another way. These dwellers in their own 
 homes, each with a considerable garden allot- 
 ment, were for the most part partially em- 
 ployed in tilling and tending the fruit and 
 vegetable farms aforesaid and packing the pro - 
 ducts according to the seasons. Their well- 
 being was founded on their combination of 
 this open-air life with enjoyment in certain 
 small or petty trades. A few of the better 
 craftsmen, training lads as apprentices, pro- 
 duced good furniture in their small wood- 
 workshops, some of the worse-crippled occu- 
 pied in turnery as less fatiguing than bench- 
 work. I noticed that the machinery of a 
 band-saw was welcomed for getting out the 
 harder wood in the rough, so as to release the 
 craftsman for giving the beauty of his hand- 
 work in the completed piece. And in rather 
 larger shops, with that kind of fantastic 
 activity which Dumazet noticed in a more 
 
 «7 
 
The TOWER 
 
 happily industrial France all round Beauvais 
 and Amiens, as well as in theirown homes, 
 the greater number of the men in the winter 
 were producing a host of the engaging articles 
 of wood, or wood and iron, which the general 
 community needed in thousands — pieces for 
 weavers, spindles, measures, funnels, brooms, 
 mouse-traps, spoons, salt-boxes, plate-racks, 
 and so forth. An added industry for a 
 separated group was for the fabrication of felt 
 hats such as I remembered near Quimperle, 
 in Brittany, and for our own straw hats at 
 Luton. Most of the women and girls whom 
 domestic management did not absorb were 
 occupied in their own homes or upon gowns 
 and embroidery. There were no employers. 
 In each of the trades the workers belonged to 
 a co-operative society and sent their produce 
 every fortnight to a co-operative store in the 
 town, where it was sold for their benefit by 
 their own direct agent-members. I ascer- 
 tained that in order to buy material in bulk 
 at good seasons they were financed by muni- 
 cipal credit-banks, which made advances on 
 the security of their good character and their 
 plant. 
 
 The homes of these happy and contented 
 workers, which as a rule were not owned by 
 them, usually belonged to a Public Utility 
 Society easily directed by a Board of disin- 
 terested men and women such as, to their 
 68 
 
The TOWER 
 
 praise, have ever been concerned for local 
 government in our Islands. 
 
 I can hardly communicate to you my de- 
 lighted impression of the cheerful and pros- 
 perous life in these little communities; and 
 when I recall that they were originally born 
 out of the agony of the War and the pitiful 
 experience of its victims, I can only do 
 homage to the Divine which redeems all 
 Human Life and glorifies its trials. 
 
 And I hold in honouring remembrance that 
 courageous man who lived at both ends of 
 the Thames and sang of the Day that was 
 Coming : — 
 
 For then, laugh not, but listen to this strange tale of 
 
 mine. 
 All folk that are in England shall be better lodged than 
 swine. 
 
 Then a man shall work and bethink him, and rejoice in 
 
 the deeds of his hand, 
 Nor yet come home in the even too faint and weary to 
 
 stand. 
 
 Men in that time a-coming shall work and have no fear 
 For to-morrow's lack of earning and the hunger-wolf 
 a-near. 
 
 I tell you this for a wonder, that no man then shall be 
 
 glad 
 Of his fellow's fall and mishap to snatch at the work 
 
 he had. 
 For that which the worker winneth shall then be his 
 
 indeed, 
 Nor shall half be reaped for nothing by him that sowed 
 
 no seed. 
 
 6 9 
 
The TOWER 
 
 O strange new wonderful justice ! But for whom shall 
 
 we gather the gain ? 
 For ourselves and for each of our fellows, and no hand 
 
 shall labour in vain. 
 
 Then all Mine and all Thine shall be Ours, and no 
 
 more shall any man crave 
 For riches that serve for nothing but to fetter a friend 
 
 for a slave. 
 
 Come, join in the only battle wherein no man can fail, 
 Where whoso fadeth and dieth, yet his deeds shall still 
 prevail. 
 
 Ah ! come, cast off all fooling, for this, at least, we 
 
 know : 
 That the Dawn and the Day is coming, and forth the 
 
 Banners go. 
 
 70 
 
t^» t^> C^> t^> t^J t^» t^ t^» t^i «^"> t^J t^5 t^> t^> t^> t^> l^»t^i 
 
 §VII. NEW TOWNS 
 
 t^> l^> t^"S t^l t^> t^» C^5 t^> fc^J t^> t^> t^> «^> Ci?" - t^> «^» t^> t^» 
 
 AS I look back upon my experience 
 of that amazing and joy-giving 
 journey through a new England, 
 I can recall even apparently small 
 things which contributed to my 
 sense of her being what the Priest had 
 spoken of— a Tower of courage and comfort, 
 within and outwardly, where most of the 
 headcraft or handcraft contributions of each 
 worker to the commonwealth were exchanged 
 among the members of the community. 
 
 Both in the large Sale-stores and in the cheer- 
 ful small workshops, which I almost preferred 
 to haunt for the pleasure of hobnobbing 
 with the iron-smith over his forge or a wood- 
 worker himself assembling a bedstead out of 
 all the parts he had made, I detected a quiet 
 beauty of the products of this fresher genera- 
 tion. Scribe as I was in my calling, I just 
 knew that it signified a reasonable pleasure 
 in the making of the things. 
 
 I found that a not wholly anticipated but 
 entirely natural result of the emancipation of 
 industry from wage-slavery and its mis- 
 capitalisation by non-producers was the crea- 
 tion of free craftsmen. That is to say, in the 
 trades which lent themselves to scope for the 
 
 7i 
 
The TOWER 
 
 exercise of the creative birthright which dis- 
 tinguishes the free worker from the slave, such 
 as smithy-work and nearly all wood-work, 
 turnery and inlaid work, leather work from 
 harness of all kinds to the production of good, 
 durable boots, pottery, tailoring, printing and 
 building in all its branches, from fine masonry 
 to the finish of the smallest mouldings, there 
 was a zest which appeared to have a direct 
 relation to the quality and durable fitness of 
 the products. For many of the commodities 
 which our crowded population needs (like 
 electric lamps and food tins and lead pencils 
 and screws and common bottles), factories — 
 that is, large workshops for the association of 
 comparatively unskilled labour with time- 
 saving machinery — still, of course, remained. 
 But even here the processes were not so 
 mechanical and deadening to the spirit as of 
 old. This, I found, was partly because the 
 Labour Community was thoroughly infected 
 with an irresistible intention of having reason- 
 able leisure among reasonable employment. It 
 had demanded and had obtained it. It was no 
 longer stunted in its intelligence and capacity 
 for pleasure by any degrading meanness of its 
 homes or poisonous dirt in its environment. 
 
 And I discovered also that the folk of Eng- 
 land as a whole, those who lived either in 
 towns or through the countryside, by the 
 labour of their hands mainly or as brain- 
 72 
 
The TOWER 
 workers, professional men and women and all 
 engaged in commerce (there being now very 
 few unfortunate persons of sound health who 
 were mere rent-drawers or unoccupied with 
 some task or other), that all these folk, I say, 
 were, like their Tudor and Georgian fore- 
 fathers, content with a much simpler and 
 smaller amount of furniture and dress for their 
 daily life, and that Society no longer itched for 
 the myriad follies and rubbish which Labour 
 was hired to produce in the Victorian time. 
 
 It was, for instance, less easy to find a home 
 in Kensington, where a living room would be 
 crowded with a crazy collection of bric-a-brac 
 and cheap German ornaments, and fussy 
 frames for insignificant prints, and bits of un- 
 stable furniture which no producer ever felt 
 any pride in making and every housemaid fret- 
 fully cursed each morning in dusting. As I 
 found later, the homesteads and cottages of 
 the rural districts were once again devoid of 
 the nasty cheap products of sweated labour, 
 and cheerful rather with articles of use and 
 want, well-made because usually made at 
 home or in the district. 
 
 I cannot pretend to tell you how causes and 
 effects were related, or how the looms of in- 
 dustrial activity, with all their shuttles and 
 cunning contrivances, produced this happy 
 result. But I do believe that it was accele- 
 rated by, and indeed could not have been 
 73 
 
The TOWER 
 achieved without, that passionate and almost 
 religious revolution in " the hearts of men " 
 (as Jan Smuts used to iterate in the War-time 
 itself) to which the tragedy of the Catastrophe 
 stirred the folk of our Islands, compelling 
 them to make a better social fabric for the 
 common weal. . . . 
 
 This New Life, of which I speak thus 
 briefly, was nowhere more apparent or vivid 
 than in the New Towns which I discovered in 
 my pilgrimage. 
 
 I would tell you of one, not stopping to tell 
 you of quite remarkable changes which were 
 arranged in the cities of the north, from York- 
 shire through to Scotland and across in the 
 rival districts of East and West Lancashire 
 and in " the Potteries." The workers had re- 
 fused any longer to tolerate for homes the 
 pitiable housing of cramped and graceless 
 streets and shoddy building which their fathers 
 had put up with. Curiously enough, the chief 
 weapons of destruction were the forks and 
 spades which were so busy on allotments in 
 the War time. Keightley vigorously pioneered 
 the protest. At Leicester the gardening of 
 the townsfolk transformed the city. Salford 
 and Portsmouth one wonderful spring night 
 were each, by one of those inexplicable sympa- 
 thetic outbursts of action which, like the 
 breaking of an unhealthy abscess, are found 
 among the episodes of history, the scene of a 
 74 
 
The TOWER 
 
 wild destruction of slum property, certain 
 Trade-Guilds having quietly and successfully 
 planned the exodus of some wretched 
 families at midnight before a breeze fanned a 
 mysterious conflagration into a consuming 
 furnace. The flames were a fiery banner for 
 a crusade against all hovels and dirty tene- 
 ments, and the aims of town-planners were 
 rapidly advanced. . . . 
 
 I have said I would tell you of a New 
 Town, and I will choose one in Warwick- 
 shire, built at Thurlaston, between Coventry 
 and Rugby, where Guy once slew the Blue 
 Boar. 
 
 From Canada our Home Government bor- 
 rowed the idea of a Ministry of Conservation 
 and Development which controlled its own 
 housing. In the War-time itself, as an able 
 Scotsman told me who had pioneered it, the 
 Canadian authorities printed 50,000 leaflets 
 on sensible housing, 10,000 of them (by a 
 happy stroke) in the French language. They 
 realised the wisdom of that big-brained and 
 big-hearted American, Edison, who once said : 
 " Only as we each forget our selfish desires 
 and keep in mind the final good of all con- 
 cerned, shall we reduce the cost of living 
 and solve our great social and industrial 
 problems." . . . 
 
 This New Town in Warwickshire was one 
 of nine, the building of which was definitely 
 IS 
 
The TOWER 
 encouraged, and indeed in part undertaken, 
 by the State immediately after the War. 
 
 The plans were prepared during the War, 
 much as during the French Revolution the de- 
 signs of a remodelled Paris were drawn out 
 by industrious architects in her city cellars 
 while the fury raged above. 
 
 The Government, to their own astonish- 
 ment and the alarm of unimaginative people, 
 were impelled to it by the demands of Labour- 
 workers by brain and hand, who insisted very 
 articulately that the enlargement of existing 
 cities, with their mean and designless belts 
 of haphazard slums and factories, would be 
 a national crime and an affront to the men 
 who had fought and died for England. The 
 whole weight of economic, civic and hygienic 
 wisdom was brought to bear, irresistibly, on 
 this solution of the necessity for overdue 
 housing schemes and for a just and sound 
 method of industrial productivity. The result 
 was truly astonishing. It would have de- 
 lighted that ardent and happy reformer of the 
 days of my youth, Howard, who, luckier than 
 most prophets in their own age and country, 
 conceived that idea of the Garden-City which, 
 through good report and ill, leavened town- 
 building in every nation of the Old World 
 and the New, from Portugal to La Plata. 
 
 The advantages of what was implicit in a 
 crude doctrine of land-nationalisation were 
 
 76 
 
The TOWER 
 
 obtained, without its weakness, by a State 
 aided system of municipal land-purchase. 
 This bridged the interval before the new- 
 built town was ready to hold its first dwellers. 
 It secured a reasonable control of plan, size 
 and arrangement. It prevented the incre- 
 ment of the city's later communal wealth from 
 passing into private pockets and gave it back, 
 in the adornment of its Public Buildings and 
 Gardens and in a Gallery and a Theatre of 
 living art and drama, to those who had 
 earned it. 
 
 With forethought the railway serving the 
 Town was concealed from all its residential 
 quarters, the clatter and banging of its traffic 
 cut off by rising ground which also screened 
 the noisier factories to and from which the 
 railroad brought material and carried pro- 
 ducts. The Town itself had already become 
 comely and settled in appearance, not too 
 uniform to be inviting, but not so chaotic as 
 to disgust. I was told that this particular 
 town was mainly designed and erected by a 
 school of architectural carftsmen trained by 
 Lutyens, whom I remembered that the praise 
 of his own fellow-masters, the best praise, de- 
 clared to be among the first artists of his day. 
 The Town-centre was extraordinarily well- 
 managed, so that you could not detect the 
 artifices of its design. It revived in my heart 
 the thrill with which, one morning of May, I 
 
 >7 
 
The TOWER 
 
 stood under the Rath-haus of Rothenburg in 
 Bavaria (a city vieing with our own Bridg- 
 north in the natural beauty of its site, and 
 unspoiled like Bridgnorth), and with my com- 
 rade fondly believed that a clear song from 
 silver trumpets high on its tower was a special 
 compliment of welcome to ourselves. The 
 ensemble of the place was such that my mind 
 foresaw that future generations would find 
 the planning and the architecture pleasing be- 
 cause well-done, like Salisbury and Wood- 
 bridge of the towns and cities of the older 
 time, which were least damaged by shoddy 
 building and defaced with the itch and disease 
 of the competitive scramble after money. 
 
 The divisible or sectional factories, with 
 light partitions, convenient loading apparatus, 
 fixtures for power transmission and central 
 heating, were sensible achievements of 
 modern skill and forethought, encouraging 
 good work and stimulating co-operative skill. 
 
 I noticed in particular that all the School - 
 sites had been carefully chosen and protected. 
 Sunshine, quiet, airiness and space were 
 secured in fullest degree — and the children 
 showed it! 
 
 Indeed, it was, as you may suppose, the 
 obvious enrichment of human life through the 
 establishment of this New Town and its trad- 
 ing regulations that both first and finally 
 pleased me. I am aware that my countrymen 
 
 78 
 
The TOWER 
 have been censured as unmusical. It may be 
 that a capacity for the pure pleasure of good 
 popular music was strangled by the joy- 
 slaying devices of the nineteenth century. 
 But I confess that my soul bounded with de- 
 light at the noon-day Folk-concert to which 
 the people of this Town flocked as a recreation 
 from their labours. 
 
 I do not suppose that the trials and troubles 
 which dwell in some of the shuttles of Fate 
 that are thrown for ever in the loom of Human 
 Life are absent from these new communities. 
 Jealousy and anger and meanness and passion 
 remain as the tokens of our imperfection, the 
 prices of our birthright. I am speaking of a 
 merry England, not a dull Heaven. But I do 
 say that I believed I was but dreaming when 
 I beheld this cheerful multitude of citizens— 
 the children with their lively, reckless ways; 
 the older folk held in honour, and not dulled or 
 bent by toil; the young men and maidens — 
 all tall, straight, round-faced, and well-com- 
 plexioned — at this hour of amusement simply 
 the children grown large until their general 
 healthy and open companionship tumbled into 
 particular love-making which was neither shy 
 nor low; the wives proud, and not weary, from 
 their motherhood, so that you might say of 
 each what Hardy put as the desire of his hero 
 — " a child among pleasures and a woman 
 among pains " ; the men, having doffed the 
 79 
 
The TOWER 
 
 overalls and tunics of their workshops so as 
 to bathe their heads and limbs in the pure 
 summer air for an hour, consciously and de- 
 cently aware, as becomes men, that a Ruskin 
 need no longer warn that they are not to be 
 helped by almsgiving or by preaching of 
 patience or of hope, or by any other means 
 emollient or consolatory, except the one thing 
 God orders for them — justice. 
 
 So that, now, you will ask, what are the con- 
 ditions of Labour in this New Life in such a 
 New Town ? What is their share of the con- 
 trol in the organised trades? And have the 
 workers absorbed, or repudiated, or repaid the 
 capital moneys of the non-workers ? 
 
 Well, I have mentioned Salisbury, and I 
 cannot say that the new industrial fabric, in 
 these new days, matches what once suited 
 Salisbury, so that its attractive traces are still 
 visible in Poultry Cross and Butcher Row, in 
 the Hall of John Halle on the Canal, with its 
 old attractive stained glass; the Jacobean 
 facade of the Joiners' Hall, in St. Ann 
 Street, the windows and oak shields 
 from the Tailors' Hall, built when Henry 
 VIII. was king, at the corner of Pennyfarth- 
 ing Street in Swayne's or the Ship Chequer, 
 near the Crystal Fountain Inn (delicious 
 names !) ; and the earlier Doom fresco over the 
 chancel arch of the Church of St. Thomas, 
 which some fortunate merchant pilgrim had 
 80 
 
The TOWER 
 painted to the honour of St. Oswald. Such 
 are the survivals of the time when the authori- 
 ties which regulated trade in the interests of 
 the whole community, subject to the Crown 
 executive and Municipal control, were the 
 Merchants' Guild, including all those that 
 traded in commodities which they did not 
 make, such as the export and import merchant, 
 the grocer, the mercer, the vintner, and the 
 woolmonger, and the Crafts' Guilds of those 
 engaged in the home industries, such as 
 weavers, skinners, joiners, bakers, glovers, 
 shoemakers, and clothworkers — a good indus- 
 trial company, full of local and workshop 
 patriotism, given to healthy amusements, 
 their handiwork supplying their livelihood, 
 their labour yielding a life of liberty and 
 character. 
 
 What further help, have I often thought 
 in my youth, will vou, O Worship- 
 ful Companies of the Mysteries or 
 Trades of Carpenters, Goldsmiths, Mer- 
 cers, Skinners, Clothworkers and Leather- 
 sellers of the City of London, already 
 generous in modern generations, render out 
 of your munificence and funded inheritances 
 to buy back for Modern Labour its thwarted 
 leisure and shackled freedom? And lo! 
 here, in these new Towns of England, I found 
 the fruits of their applied wealth, in the re- 
 organisation of all skilled work and the dis- 
 81 
 
The TOWER 
 
 tribution of its results, and the provision of 
 comely Guilds' Halls where differences and 
 problems could be adjusted and the comfort- 
 able arts of hospitality jovially indulged. 
 
 For it appeared that on the tide of pas- 
 sionate endeavour which arose to sweep out 
 the waste and woe of the War, the folk of 
 England launched a new system. For the 
 trades other than those vast staple vocations 
 which, as I have told you, readily took on the 
 form of National Guilds associated with 
 the State control of material, retained in 
 appearance the various outward shapes and 
 modes of industrial method — ranging from 
 the personal craftsman through partnerships 
 and group-workshops to highly organised and 
 graded societies or corporations. Manage- 
 ment and working capital were still indis- 
 pensable to all but a few trades, and good 
 sense as well as a frank and extremely active, 
 not to say pugnacious, dislike of all roguery 
 and drone-like absenteeism had achieved 
 wonders. Indeed, I can report that the whole 
 Spirit of Labour was differently tempered. 
 Dispelling the sad old atmosphere of com- 
 peting and grab, and suspicion and nasty prac- 
 tices of black-listing and sabotage, a steady 
 breeze of industrial reform, inspired mainly 
 by humane standards of workshop life, and a 
 general recognition that a life that is not 
 laborious is, except for the tender, the crippled 
 82 
 
The TOWER 
 
 and the aged, not worth living, had fanned 
 the mills of national activity. 
 
 Of the life on the land, so that once more 
 in our English shires Mother Earth teemed 
 with her crops and fruits under the tillage of 
 a sturdy rural husbandry, I shall presently 
 tell you. 
 
 Here I have to record what I could dis- 
 cover of the causes and conditions which had 
 occasioned the better state of labour which 
 I found in the workshops and factories of 
 this type of New Town, beyond what was 
 contributed by the environment of sensible 
 planning and healthy home-building. 
 
 I found that in each of the organised trades 
 (which covered the largest field of industry 
 between the business or the individual crafts- 
 men, whose numbers, as I have mentioned, 
 had greatly increased, and the national 
 guilds of miners, ship-builders and transport- 
 workers) a healthy and kindling trade-con- 
 sciousness had been created. Each such in- 
 dustry, being given its own frontiers and its 
 flag, had come to have its own patriotism from 
 which, as you might expect, higher standards 
 of both work and conduct were the happy 
 consequences. Do you know what I mean, 
 O reader ? Yes, if you are yourself a worker, 
 you will know it from your own experience. 
 Your own heart in your work will tell you. . . 
 
 The quality of your work is heightened 
 
 83 
 
The TOWER 
 
 when you are not annoyed or disheartened by 
 tricks to capture the fruits of it away from 
 you, or by a system which fences you off from 
 the intercourse or appreciation of those who 
 use your products. 
 
 The quality of your conduct is enriched 
 when for your physical well-being the decen- 
 cies and amenities of the place of your labour 
 are consulted, so that you exchange the very 
 spirit of them with that of your own hearth 
 and home, where are the centres of all the love 
 and grace that is in your life. 
 
 And lest you should think that I narrate 
 something that is only an ideal Message from 
 Nowhere, let me assure you that men and 
 women have only come to these standards of 
 a more cheerful and worthy life by much 
 patience over humdrum remedies and by dint 
 of that forbearance and denial which are the 
 marks of religion, the very stigmata of the 
 cross which Labour carries along the Road of 
 Life. Thus, this new generation benefited 
 by sensible and permanent habits for the 
 periodic review of the rates of wages and pay 
 — recognising that the discs of gold and silver 
 are but mere counters of exchange and not 
 wealth in themselves; for the standardising of 
 flatter rates throughout the country, so as to 
 supplant the illogical variations of different 
 localities; for frequent and regular intercourse 
 between shop-stewards and managers, so that 
 
 8 4 
 
The TOWER 
 
 the directorate should not be for ever tempted 
 to " outpoint " the workers; for a closer asso- 
 ciation of all engaged in the industry so as to 
 increase the publicity of its conditions, and, in 
 ways both economic and psychological, give to 
 the toilers a share and interest in their pro- 
 ductions. 
 
 These, in this New England, are the charac - 
 ters of a New Labour won by national effort. 
 The old remedies of co-partnership, scientific 
 management, payment by results, would 
 never have achieved it. A national effort, 
 patient and courageous, by the forces of all 
 Labour directed by leaders of trained intelli- 
 gence, has created in these New Towns a life 
 of which I could only discern the difficult 
 beginnings in the great Wen and the other 
 cities of my youth, when we sought to save 
 the land from the hands of dead-weight 
 people; and the Catastrophe produced the 
 Opportunity. 
 
 Thus, a Century and a Tragedy have been 
 wanted since that forth-right man, William 
 Cobbett, proclaimed from horseback his 
 opinion of what was needed for the workers 
 of England whom he saw in rags and without 
 a bellyful : — 
 
 That the way to make them good, to make them 
 honest, to make them dutiful, to make them kind to 
 one another, is to enable them to live well; and I also 
 know that none of these things will ever be accom- 
 
 85 
 
The TOWER 
 
 plished by Methodist sermons, and by those stupid, at 
 once stupid and malignant things, and roguish things 
 called Religious Tracts. 
 
 Thus Cobbett, stretching his hand across 
 two generations to Morris, who watched the 
 faces and figures of them that went by his 
 riverside windows at Hammersmith, and 
 replied : — 
 
 I know by my own feelings and desires what these 
 men want, what would have saved them from this lowest 
 depth of savagery : employment which would foster 
 their self-respect and win the praise and sympathy oi 
 their fellows, and dwellings which they could come to 
 with pleasure, surroundings which would soothe and 
 elevate them; reasonable labour, reasonable rest. 
 
 86 
 
t^» «^> e^ t^i t^> t^> t^> t^J t^> t^» t^s <*?"-. t^> t^> t^5 t^a t^ «^> 
 
 §VIII. THE COUNTRYSIDE 
 
 t^J t^J t^ t^ tj&i i&t t^5 t^J t^> «^> t^5 1^> t^> t^a t^ t^> t^> e^> 
 
 THERE was, as I found, one abid- 
 ing and uplifting glory left in 
 England — the calm dignity in 
 all seasons of the countryside, 
 with its stir of labour against the 
 challenge of Nature, its direct relation of 
 Man's demands to God's supplies, its settled 
 rotation of the beautiful and the awesome to 
 stimulate the wonder of all sensitive creatures. 
 So threatened by the folly of my fore- 
 fathers, if this dignity had been stolen from 
 my country, I do indeed think that life would 
 be a long nightmare for my children's children, 
 But, then, Mother-Nature cannot and will 
 not die until in some solar holocaust .... 
 But I will keep to my tale, reminding you, 
 as I do myself, of those comfortable words of 
 John Ruskin : — 
 
 Hard labour on the earth, the work of the husband- 
 man and of the shepherd ... to dress the earth and to 
 keep the flocks of it . . . the first task of man and the final 
 one . . . the education always of noblest lawgivers, kings, 
 and teachers; the education of Hesiod, of Moses, of 
 David, of all the true strength of Rome; and all its 
 tenderness; the pride of Cincinnatus, and the inspira- 
 tion of Virgil. 
 
 They ran, like a pleasant echo, along the 
 
 87 
 
The TOWER 
 little corridors of my mind, as my roan mare 
 bore me through the gates and up the broken 
 road to the top of the hill whence I knew that 
 I should see the sea whose salt scent already 
 just reached me through the mist. 
 
 I had left the square-planned old English 
 town set between the rivers by its western 
 road, and struck south for the heath across the 
 bridge under whose warm stone and brick 
 arches the trout hung as if no gallant band of 
 King Charles' men had ever fallen by its para- 
 pets with noisy death-dealing clamour. The 
 heather was at the top of its glory, not yet 
 tinged with brown of decay, as we swung along 
 the road-side turf towards the Castle woods. 
 But alas! the scuds of a coming rain-storm 
 began to veil the ridge and quickly, over my 
 left shoulder, hid the sharp lime-stone hill-top 
 which, beyond the two fir-clad mounds, cut 
 the rounded edge of the downs. However, as 
 I turned her seawards to climb the height, I 
 cared not for the damp, and only praised the 
 Creator of this scene, whoever he might be, 
 and hummed the modern poet's psalm : 
 
 Oh, London Town's a fine town, and London sights 
 
 are rare, 
 And London ale is right ale, and brisk's the London air, 
 And busily goes the world there; but crafty grows the 
 
 mind, 
 And London Town of all towns I'm glad to leave 
 
 behind. 
 
 88 
 
The TOWER 
 
 Then hey for the road, the west road, by bridge and 
 
 forge and fold, 
 Scent o* the fern and song o* the lark, by hills and 
 
 woods and wold; 
 To the homely folk at the hearthstone, and the ale 
 
 beside the fire, 
 In the western land, the goodly land, my land o* 
 
 Heart's Desire. 
 
 At the top I buttoned my tunic and cape as 
 I guided her to twist the gate-latch with my 
 crop, and then I found two other horsemen, 
 who had come eastwards along the top to 
 where the road wound down the hill. And we 
 rode down it together, warily, to a farm. 
 
 " Here's a good shelter, sir, at any rate." 
 
 We came with our horses out of the deluge 
 of a summer thunder-storm into the yard of a 
 stone-built barn, and turned them, steaming, 
 through the door, to wait till the rain was 
 over. 
 
 The uniforms of my companions declared 
 them to be yeomanry officers, with the air of 
 country gentlemen — alert, truth - dealing, 
 hearty men such as England has ever bred in 
 the countryside. Free for a morning from 
 their summer training, they had ridden to- 
 gether for an hour or so along these Purbeck- 
 heights above the glitter and shades of the 
 Channel, where — how long ago it seemed to 
 me!— a force of defenders once before the 
 Great War resisted an attack of mock in- 
 vaders, giving a real discipline and a broad 
 
 89 
 
The TOWER 
 
 efficiency of mind and limb to well-filled bands 
 of townsmen and provincials. 
 
 They hung their dripping cloaks on a row 
 of nails. 
 
 " What a heavenly quiet here," said the 
 elder. " It was good of you to bring me over. 
 Besides, I have the charming hospitality, such 
 as we can still find at some houses in old 
 England, of your lady and yourself." 
 
 The younger man was pleased, for he had 
 evidently taken trouble in an easy way to bring 
 his superior officer as his guest. It appeared, 
 as they told me in their friendly talk, that he 
 was the life tenant of a small, but fair, estate, 
 and had been for a time the despair of the 
 family lawyers and the more crotchety of his 
 trustees for the way in which he, for one, 
 baffled the arguments of the communists for 
 an example of selfish ownership. 
 
 " Your people at the farms as we came 
 through, even the old men and the very 
 children at the gates, seem unusual somehow 
 and not over-loaded like some I know. They 
 look really cheerful — smiling honestly, the 
 men and women looking fresher and more 
 open than I see them elsewhere. 
 
 " Well, sir, my father took care about it in 
 the upheaval after the Catastrophe, and I try to 
 follow him. And let us say the countryside is 
 now at last in for a hopeful time, although 
 there's still such a terrible croaking and hum- 
 90 
 
The TOWER 
 
 bugging in the Press. I sometimes think it's 
 a good thing these country folk don't have 
 time for all the newspapers that your feverish 
 city-folk will still pore over. As it is, they do 
 unhappily get hold of the wrong ones — the 
 murders and sudden deaths and a pickle of 
 silly trash. . . . But, you see, I hold — and 
 it ought to be simple enough for every one to 
 grasp and proclaim — that the right aim of a 
 nation is the creation of fine human beings, 
 social and kindly, and not merely the produc- 
 tion of national wealth. Things are getting 
 better, slowly but surely, in the big towns, 
 now that the hearts of men have revolted 
 against so much grinding greed and restless 
 rush and have reduced the chances of 
 foreign trouble by getting armaments 
 reduced. That is why we hope for our 
 nation — both here at home and over the 
 seas. To grow fine human beings we found 
 that we must repeople the land. In our grand- 
 fathers' time a great wrong was done to the 
 agricultural labourer. But with the War 
 over, we got him back to the land, keen, 
 efficient, uncringing, feeling that he had a 
 stake in the country, courageous in outlook, 
 initiative in action, co-operative with his 
 neighbours. Democracy in general, and the 
 rural credit-bank in particular, gave him no 
 need of the gombeen man, no dread of the 
 squire. His son could no longer become the 
 9i 
 
The TOWER 
 
 poor creature whom a Bishop once saw in the 
 old days scaring rooks off a cornfield and itch- 
 ing to follow two sisters off to Canada because 
 " I think that chaps like us have not got much 
 of a chance in these parts." His daughter has 
 not fretted for the town and its crafty traps, 
 or slipped off in the night, like the girls of 
 a former Ireland, to the colonies. Nowadays, 
 a country boy has a sensible schooling, with 
 an improved book and science training, but is 
 offered a carpenter's bench and a mechanic's 
 vice for the evenings and some healthy fun in 
 village-hall for the long wintry nights, so as 
 to earn better money from State-aided farmers 
 and get some sense of security in the right to 
 work and a proper and reasonable pay for that 
 work. The village maiden, kept from all 
 drudgery in childhood, has at least every 
 chance of staying in her country home, with 
 reasonable field or dairy toil, reasonable rest, 
 to be ready for an honourable and happy 
 mating, and so to become the proud mother 
 of fine human beings. ... So, and only so, 
 is the life of the country being revivified and 
 rekindled. In no other way can we have 
 again some modern version of the old 
 peasantry who once worked round your great 
 barns and built the hamlet churches; the 
 happy village-mothers and the sturdy fathers 
 whom Pinwell and Fred Walker used to draw 
 for us in England and Millet in France." 
 92 
 
The TOWER 
 
 " It seems to me," I said, " that in your 
 generation you have found that it was pos- 
 sible. And, as I have gathered in my rural 
 rides, it has come because after the War there 
 were some few thousands of intelligent and 
 unprejudiced men, including those happily 
 cured from their broken nerves and wasted 
 muscles, who, having had some business or 
 civil training before they fought for Liberty, 
 were willing to learn from agricultural instruc- 
 tors and settle on the land." 
 
 "You are right," said the older man. " In 
 old days, attempts to settle soldiers on the 
 land often failed, because retired long-service 
 men did not get on well with the village folk 
 whom they joined. But the men you speak 
 of were of a different type, and the State wisely 
 encouraged them to settle in large enough 
 groups to form a society for themselves. 
 They were shy about it at first, longing to be 
 quit of all army ways and a little suspicious 
 of State-aid, but good sense prevailed after 
 the first careful experiments." 
 
 " It must," I said, " have cost a big effort 
 to win this miracle, with Canada and Australia 
 and Asia pouring in their ship-loads of grain ; 
 with a vast territory like Russia at last and 
 again, after her own tragedies in the War, de- 
 veloping her agriculture by the aid of our 
 British 'Ransomes' and other implements; 
 with the machinery here at home displacing 
 93 
 
The TOWER 
 
 labour; and with the gay, bright towns piping 
 their appeal to a youth or a maid just as man- 
 hood and womanhood is rising up like sap 
 with the desire of liberty and adventure ? " 
 
 " Yes, 55 replied the other, " there were all 
 those forces to meet. But the change came, 
 for all their thwarting. c All things flow,' as 
 the Greek sage said, and history repeats its 
 circles in all essential movements of social life. 
 Let us track it out, for this rain is pelting. 
 But here comes an expert, perhaps, in prophet's 
 garb! He'll shelter here and we 5 ll consult 
 him. I have often got wisdom from fellow- 
 travelling strangers on a journey. Truth 
 often leaps in flashes on a chance talk, to 
 lighten up ignorance or obscurity. . . . 
 Good-day to you ! " 
 
 " Annan ? B-r-r-h ! — but it's wet, so it is ! 
 You gents did well to get here avore this 
 scud." 
 
 And the comical figure shook himself and 
 slid a worn oilskin cape from his shoulders. 
 He was an old pedlar, with baggy trousers 
 over sodden white shoes, a dragging frock 
 coat, and on the top of his grizzled head a 
 once gay cricket cap. He gave the eye a 
 strange contrast to the solid, military apparel 
 of our fellow-shelterers, as, muttering, he laid 
 his staff against a door-jamb and stopped to 
 wipe the wet off a strange pack of buttons and 
 tapes and picture cards. 
 
 94 
 
The TOWER 
 
 The young captain continued the talk to 
 prevent awkwardness. 
 
 " Still, even if the Ford tractors and all 
 the other engines and reapers and binders do 
 the work of many hands, the great rich earth 
 remains for ever to be tilled, and our Colonials 
 have always told us it was the best. We took 
 a hint from them and kept the rating on the 
 first capital value and multiplied new uses 
 for the land, tilling again some of the pastures 
 and planting the right trees in the right places. 
 It has taken time, but the pastoral poets need 
 not starve. After all, as the Irishman says, 
 i there will always be love, twilight and the 
 stars ' ! Won't there, Daniel ? " 
 
 " Thomas, Captain, Thomas — not Dan'l 
 Thomas Stickland — at least so it was fifty 
 years ago. I was an army man myself then," 
 and his little eyes twinkled as he stood at 
 salute, one leg hanging a little loose. " ' Luv, 
 twilight, and the shining stars ' ! Yes, I'm 
 too old for part of it, though Pm fairly spry 
 still to get athirt these girt hills; but many a 
 night avore I've hided in the barns after the 
 twilight has come on, I've gazed at the stars 
 as they've lit, and wondered if the folk in 
 'em have their problems an' if there's a huge, 
 overcrowded wen of a city in the Great Bear, 
 and whether there be ploughin' and tillin' and 
 hoein' in the luvely Evening Star, or only 
 95 
 
The TOWER 
 
 veary rings and shining lights. I shouldn't 
 wonder! " 
 
 " Are you countryman or town ? " said one 
 of the others, puzzled at the notions and 
 mixed speech. 
 
 " I've a-been a-walken most of my days 
 since the Fritzes hit me. Don't get so stiff, 
 perhaps! But I've had to scraggle about, 
 and I knows the old Kent Road as well as 
 I know the Heath to Wareham. You can't 
 say that, Captains! You're swells, and, any- 
 way, you've never known what it is for chaps 
 o' the like of me. Mebbe, you've had no 
 time to think. Gawd in Heaven, what 
 thinkin' I've done in my time! An' good 
 thinkin', too, mark you. Old soger, yes — 
 bashed by nasty bullets for a grateful country; 
 thirty years on the scrap-heap, because they 
 could do nothing with me. I was a born 
 roamer, I was. Ah! but I've alius had my 
 thought-pot with me! " and he tapped his 
 grizzled head; " and I've often said to Tom, 
 I have, * Tom, my son, you knew what the 
 Old Country wanted, for all they thought you 
 a poor mad Tom. You were born on the 
 land, Tom, you were, and you should have 
 known what was coming and kept your 
 strength there, and waxed thick and lusty and 
 sweated among the crops and the beasts, and 
 taken a wholesome maid— luv, twilight and 
 the stars! — and a little house for your palace, 
 96 
 
The TOWER 
 Tom, with a bit o' garden. You were a dam* 
 fool, Tom, to itch for the flaring and lying 
 town and be caught for sogering.' . . . But 
 there, what was a chap to do, guv'nors ? What 
 was a young feller to do, if he believed that 
 all the siller he'd get for ever and ever was 
 ever so little more than what he made as a 
 lad at the farm, and 'e couldn't love his maid 
 and do honest by her when 'e wanted to be- 
 cause there was no cottage for him if there 
 were : it was tied to farmer Jorkins from Kent 
 way, whom he'd like to squot with a big 
 clout, only Moses and parson said you 
 mustn't ! What was a young feller to do ? " 
 
 " Well, Tom," said the younger man, 
 " you know they mended things." 
 
 " Mended 'em now perhaps, gents ! But 
 not quite in time for poor Tom. I was sent 
 crazy, too, by that awful din in Flanders for 
 a time, and none to befriend me, and then the 
 great Mother healed me, and I thought things 
 out for myself so long ago and no one to listen 
 to me. And now I find it done, but too late 
 for me. . . . That's all there is between 
 us. I'll tell you. . . . Tom's done some 
 thinking! " 
 
 And from his pack of poor cards he picked 
 a grimy envelope with some scribbled notes 
 and old paper clippings to address this quaint 
 public meeting. The captains had hardly 
 noticed that children had slipped in from the 
 97 
 
The TOWER 
 farm, attracted by the voices — a little maid 
 and a slip of a boy, into whose fist Tom passed 
 a piece of stale chocolate. 
 
 " Gen'lemen, you'd a-got to clear the 
 ground first. No, not robbery and confis 
 catin', I don't mean that, though Gawd knows 
 there's precedent! I mean, in your thinkin\ 
 Tou don't remember the Enclosure Laws — 
 nor do I — but if you gents can't I can bide 
 my gran'feyther talkin' of them and what 
 they meant, and how they druv the people 
 into the towns. Lord, it was a tragic busi- 
 ness for England, that was — and ifs in that 
 story , mark you " (and he fumbled for a 
 printed note from which he solemnly read), 
 c that there lies the moral case for the restora- 
 tion of the land to the people! ' Mark that 
 and digest it — c the moral case for the restora- 
 tion of the land to the people.' Harder 
 farmers, more selfish and town-haunting 
 squires, sporting gents from the cities — they 
 dated from that Enclosure time (mind, I don't 
 say everywhere, but most- where' s). And 
 then the other big thing that happened was 
 the machinery — the building of the clever 
 engines and the massing of the factories and 
 workshops, so that the fields were deserted 
 and the ploughshares were left to rust on the 
 edges of grass-land, and the ploughboys, or 
 some of them, turned keepers." 
 
 " Foreign corn, too, Tom." 
 
 9 8 
 
The TOWER 
 
 " Ah yes — I agree ; Pm coming to that. 
 But Pm right, gents, ain't I, about the 
 Enclosures and the Machinery ? " 
 
 They nodded inevitably. 
 
 " Agricultur', the tilling of the soil God 
 gave men and women to live by and on, got 
 neglected through the old Queen's reign. 
 The people flocked to the towns, and mebbe it 
 'ud be all right if they flourished there. But 
 did they? It's why the prices o' food rose, 
 wasn't it ? It's why the men an' women had 
 bad teeth and cheatin' ways, wasn't it? It's 
 why the children didn't grow up bonny and 
 civil and hopeful, like even these. It's why, 
 with the acres o' ugly, dirty little dwellings 
 and the meanness of the noisy streets, the 
 women took to drink and the men to driving 
 them to it. It's why there was for many a 
 year more misery hidden in almost any square 
 mile of London and Manchester and Glasgow 
 (I've tramped them all) than any kind God 
 could have meant men to allow. . . . Ah ! I 
 know, and I'm mortal glad and thank the Lord 
 I see it avore I die, else there'd be no Heaven 
 open to share in, that things are mending a 
 good bit, and that in the towns the big blunder 
 came to be known for what it was, and men 
 and women rebelled agin' it. It took time 
 and great ark-loads of patience. . . . 
 
 " And the country, O the luvely country- 
 side, was just saved avore it was all spoiled 
 
 99 
 
The TOWER 
 
 and every farm cut up and all the pretty barns 
 turned into Sunday motor sheds! The men 
 from the Colonies and America who came over 
 told us that we had to, an 5 I reckon it was 
 wages first, and secondly cottages." 
 
 " I remember," I said, " about the wages 
 and that a fair minimum, subject to some tem- 
 porary dodging, was secured by Act of Parlia- 
 ment, without anyone being the worse for it. 
 And do you tell me that the Wage Boards 
 work well ? " 
 
 " Yes," said the young Captain. " No 
 doubt you have found our mining and railway 
 and ship-building enterprises ' nationalised ' 
 (as the word goes), but it is not so with agri- 
 culture. The industry is far too varied and 
 characteristic to be worked from a centre like 
 London. Whitehall cannot understand or 
 govern villages. The Home Parliament was 
 happily persuaded of that, and wisely carried 
 another change — of rating the country owners 
 and the farmers not upon the annual rental 
 but upon the capital value of the unimproved 
 land. And so fair rates of pay for labour 
 became possible, and the Wage Boards 
 worked well — by scarcely having to be in- 
 voked at all! " 
 
 I pondered over this for a moment, gazing 
 
 round at this prosperous small farm of two 
 
 hundred acres before me which, for all the 
 
 difficulty of its hill-side land that had chal- 
 
 ioo 
 
The TOWER 
 
 lenged the toil of husbandmen since Bretel 
 held it in Domesday time, was clearly done 
 well, and showed that the farmer was not " in 
 the pocket " of the local dealers, but could 
 hold his stocks over for a good market. 
 
 My companions read my thoughts, and one 
 of them said quietly : 
 
 " Yes; this was taken by an enterprising 
 man, whose wife saved in the War time, and 
 his friends trusted him with some capital. He 
 was teachable and resourceful, and his son, 
 who has just lost him, will tell you that his 
 father and mother never really regretted the 
 adventure of leaving town life." 
 
 The old man listened, and, eager not to be 
 ignored, wagged his head in assent. 
 
 " Yes, Tom," said the elder captain, " there 
 was a big dislocation, I grant you, for many of 
 the country gentry who paid the penalty for 
 the mistakes of their forefathers. But not all 
 were crippled, were they ?" 
 
 The old man smiled faintly. 
 
 " No, sir, not in the long run, I 'low. It 
 took time for them to pull round a bit. And 
 it meant perhaps a little less of the spending 
 avore the War time on Scotch moors and 
 Monte Carlo tables and other furrin' parts for 
 many of 'em, and maybe it meant for many 
 kind ladies and some lazy sons not so easy a 
 time and a re-sorting of their lives an' 
 pleasures. But I'm not a-goin' to rant about 
 
 IOI 
 
The TOWER 
 
 c no charity, but justice.' It's charity, a little 
 more of the loving-kindness-sort-of-charity 
 that we do want, for justice will come that way. 
 The panicky Dukes might be selling up and 
 buying big slices of Mother Earth in the 
 Colonies to begin all the trouble of land-hold- 
 ing and slums and unearned increment all over 
 again. That's apart ! But the good, sensible 
 sort of folk have stayed, and they'll have 
 nothing to fear. In most cases, and I do be- 
 lieve in all proper ones, the landlord and his 
 tenant bargain now on equal footing, and each 
 respects the other more. It's really a question 
 of fairness and equity — and I say that of land, 
 of land, mark you ! (for the Almighty hasn't 
 made enough of it for us each to have a park) 
 • — the proper rent for the owner is not what 
 most he can get out of it, but what is left for 
 him after them that manage it and till it to the 
 best advantage have got a decent living." 
 
 He paused for breath. This doctrine was 
 an effort to him. 
 
 " It's all fair dealing for the sake of 
 efficiency," he muttered, as his clear thoughts 
 found utterance. " The labourers aren't sus- 
 picious and out o' heart, being better paid. 
 They work the land with better spirit and 
 better limb, and that means benefit to the 
 State, as you gentry know better'n I do. You 
 get them free-er from worry for old age, free-er 
 from trouble and care about the childer'n, and 
 102 
 
The TOWER 
 it's mostly becos they can pay for better cot- 
 tages. Yes — better cottages, that was the 
 second great step, and every farm labourer 
 able to pay a proper price for a proper home, 
 with a tidy bit of land, too, for a different bit 
 of work. Remember what the little Jap said : 
 ' Bean sauce that smells too much of bean 
 sauce is not the best sort of bean sauce!' 
 That's why he likes the village workshop or 
 craft-school to go to as well, just as the city 
 mechanic loves a bit of garden if only he can 
 get it." 
 
 " But," I said, " as I have made my rural 
 ride through Sussex and Hampshire, much 
 along the tracks that Cobbett took a century 
 ago, I have found whole villages and colonies 
 where the occupiers were owners." 
 
 " Yes, mister, so they do tell, but I can 
 hardly credit it. . . . Poor Tom's a-tired!" 
 
 The old fellow spoke truly, and one of the 
 others picked up the tale. 
 
 " Yes, it is true. The problem, you see, 
 was how to attract to rural life numbers of 
 sturdy men of good intelligence, who, after a 
 spell of rest from the grinding conditions of 
 the warfaring, would be prepared for an 
 adventure with a reasonable certainty. A 
 greater desire for a share of the land they had 
 saved was natural. The solution was drastic, 
 but as fortunate as it was bold — nothing less 
 than State-purchase on a large scale and a 
 103 
 
The TOWER 
 
 liberal way of access to capital through credit- 
 banks. Our village-colonies, which you will 
 have seen ? " . . . 
 
 " I have," said I. 
 
 " Were wisely projected on the right scale 
 for securing social and economic advantages — 
 that is, a hundred families was taken as a low 
 unit for getting the beginnings of communal 
 life, and the initial year was made easy with 
 an outlay in expert guidance and financial help 
 which thoroughly alarmed the old-fashioned 
 economists. It was the only way — and it 
 restored and revitalised rural England. Bold- 
 ness is at all times the only policy ! " 
 
 His older companion smiled. " You can 
 afford to tell the tale," he said. " You were 
 a bit of a boy when it was done, while I can 
 remember. The exhausted Treasury called 
 check. The German indemnity that was first 
 pledged for Belgium only came in slowly as a 
 security for good behaviour. Our own pro- 
 ductivity was our only wealth — and the best ! 
 But the money was found — ^300 to ^500 
 for a family, with a sinking fund towards the 
 purchase of the holding, and the cost of a day 
 of the war achieved an affirmative, enduring 
 miracle." 
 
 " A miracle indeed, and that I have lived to 
 
 see it," sighed Tom the pedlar, harping on his 
 
 last word, old-man-wise, " cottages and wages, 
 
 wages and cottages, them were the needs, and 
 
 104 
 
The TOWER 
 
 you got them, to save old England. Also 
 scientific tillage, yes; and — and — the Bel- 
 gians' way — what's it called — oh! intensive 
 culture, yes. I know well what it all means, be • 
 lieve me, though I find the label-words hard 
 to get! Those things have all come, too, 
 especially near the settled and crowded centres, 
 with the big farms for corn crops and the 
 grazing of the beasts and the flocks in the 
 emptier parts, in the lovely rolling shires! 
 And there are the big State farms for growing 
 corn and foodstuffs for our soldiers and sailors 
 and for raising beef and mutton and breeding 
 horses and hundreds o' little homely farms o' 
 five-and-twenty acres or so, which in my time 
 of youth they derided because of the struggle 
 they meant; but the supply of credit and co- 
 operative stocks of implements and cattle and 
 facilities for transport have relieved that 
 struggle. 
 
 " And then, of course, there's another 
 great thing, though you gents be a-tired of me 
 and my talk and want to get back to your 
 
 scouting! There's the timber " (another 
 
 of his little cards came out) " 9,000,000 acres 
 in my young days were available without 
 material encroachment upon agricultural 
 land, and they found that the best rotation to 
 secure sustained timber yields was 150,000 
 acres to be afforested annually, and every year 
 since it has been done, and not a year lost. 
 105 
 
The TOWER 
 Why, there was a man who was woodman to a 
 squire up Blandford way who told me that 
 he'd read in a proper paper that they used to 
 ship to this country over ten million tons of 
 timber against the two million tons we grew, 
 and that 90 per cent, of that ten millions could 
 be grown here and be a mine of wealth worth 
 twenty million sovereigns! So that now 
 timber forests grow again in the Ashdown 
 vale and on Exmoor and the wastes of Scot- 
 land, with all the vigorous and jolly life of 
 the woodmen, from the big timber-sawyers 
 like the men in the picture, and all along the 
 grades of wood-working, with the glad cun- 
 ning that delights in cutting and planning the 
 stuff, hard or soft, to the best advantage for 
 all man's needs, down to the very matches for 
 your pipes! Think of what wood used to 
 mean for England, for her ships and boats as 
 well as for her homes and their furniture, and 
 think of what it still can mean again! Cor- 
 sican pines and spruces, Italian poplars and ash 
 have been planted, wisely and well. And, slow 
 though oaks be, set a dozen acorns here, gents, 
 here — round about this hovel — prod the 
 ground for the warm hollows for them, put 
 them in and put a little fence of thorns around 
 them, and fall on your knees like Mister 
 Hurst, of Sherwood Forest, who used to say : 
 " Now, good hap seize thee, little seed; grow 
 in a manner worthy of thy noble parents and 
 106 
 
The TOWER 
 
 be a delight for many weary men whose light 
 is not yet blown in ! ' " 
 
 Tom knelt as he spoke it, and the children 
 instinctively knelt with him, so that we others 
 were aware of them; and it broke the spell. 
 
 " Run, Winnie, child ! The rain's liftin', 
 and ask your mother for a bit of hammet for 
 old Tom, and tell her he's bringing new 
 ribbons and buttons. . . . Ah, gents! 
 There's better farming and better living at 
 last, thank the Lord, and even poor old Tom 
 knows it, though, in a manner of speaking, 
 not of it. It was a big movement to get it, 
 and praise to them that made it ! Co-operation 
 did it! A big word, and an abstract kind of 
 thing till you make sure of it — and then it's 
 final and real and spells salvation. As you 
 know, we had anarchy in our big industries. 
 Britons didn't want a servile state, did they ? 
 State Socialism all round would have throttled 
 us if it had survived the war ! For citizenship 
 and commonwealth, you don't want all life's 
 ways of invention, genius, passion, soul, and 
 waywardness — all the ways of love and loving- 
 kindness — cribbed and fixed in one neat, hard, 
 constraining framework. That's my prophecy, 
 from a tired old man who sees into things and 
 asks a blinded generation to open its eyes. 
 . . . It's a fine world we're born to . . . 
 and the countryside should for ever be kept 
 beautiful, fuller of strong men and brave 
 107 
 
The TOWER 
 
 women, all social and kindly, helping one 
 another to bring the goods home and praising 
 God for life." 
 
 The children returned as the old man 
 settled wearily down by his pack, and we three 
 set right our horses' bridles to go our own 
 ways. With his bread and cheese came three 
 mugs and a critch of cider, " For mother says 
 as won't the gen'lemen take some, too, Mr. 
 Tom, and welcome ! " 
 
 Tom poured it and the mugs passed. 
 
 " Here's health ! I'm old, misters, too old 
 now to pick up the cow-tending and help lay 
 the hedges. I do mark vor to be ending . . . 
 and I'll see a little more of the New Life yet 
 avore I go. But, here's health, I say, and may 
 God help the countryside! . . . Here, 
 children, here's picture cards for you — one for 
 Winnie and another for Will'um, and some 
 flowers for you, Missie, and a ship for 
 Will'um. . . . No, thank ye, mister. I'll 
 give these to the children and Mother'll buy 
 the ribbons, all the same! . . . Good 
 day, gents. . .'■• , Tom'll rest a bit in 
 this lewth from the wind, now that the sun's 
 a-shinin'." .... 
 
 The soldiers and I parted; they to their 
 summer-time practice in the healthy arts of 
 home defence, and I to the joyous task of 
 realising in somewise the happy rural revo- 
 lution which had come to my Motherland. 
 108 
 
The TOWER 
 
 As I proceeded on my tour I felt almost every- 
 where that happy zest and pride in my 
 country which came to that forthright patriot, 
 William Cobbett, as he rode out to Redbourn 
 and then turned off to the westward to go 
 to High Wycombe, through Hempstead and 
 Chesham, finding once more " that which is 
 such an honour to England, and that which 
 distinguishes it from all the rest of the world, 
 namely, those neatly kept and productive 
 little gardens round the labourers' houses, 
 which are seldom unornamented with more or 
 less of flowers." 
 
 Spirit of Goldsmith, too despairingly you 
 lamented in your Elegy on the Deserted 
 Village 
 
 That a bold peasantry, their country's pride, 
 When once destroyed, can never be supplied. 
 
 You will be the first from your Elysian 
 walking-ground to ponder some new ode to 
 " The Village Restored " that acclaims the 
 new day : 
 
 When every rood of ground maintains its man; 
 For him light labour spreads her wholesome store, 
 Just gives what life requires, but gives no more : 
 His best companions innocence and health; 
 And his best riches, ignorance of wealth. 
 
 IO9 
 
t^t C^"» t^» 1^5 t^ t^J fc^J t^> t^3 t^» t^i l^J t^J t^l t^l t^> t^» t^» 
 
 §IX. ON LEARNING TO LIVE 
 
 Ctf^ '-^> t^*> t^> t^J <^ t^> t^J C^S C^> t^ t^> l&-> t^> t^ t^» t^5 t^l 
 
 ONE evening, when, after wander- 
 ing back to London, I had spent 
 a day of keen pleasure in visiting 
 ing some of the Regional and 
 Civic Museums along the banks 
 of the Thames, which struck me as more alive 
 and pertinent than the huge Central Store- 
 house in Bloomsbury, I listened to my host 
 and his wife discussing school plans for their 
 children. Well I remembered how puzzled 
 my own parents had been about my own case, 
 scarce trusting their own judgment. The 
 children were in bed and should all have been 
 asleep, only the boys were still drowsily dis- 
 cussing the chances of a cruise round Poole 
 Harbour in the summer to come. The girls 
 were asleep. The maids of the household 
 were out for a play at the local theatre. 
 
 " It certainly is a problem," said the Father. 
 " It always was in our time, too," said the 
 Mother, " but it has to be settled, hasn't it ? " 
 " Yes, fortunately, for even Arcadia would 
 pall with only lambkins. . . . But it is a 
 problem, and even our New Age finds it so 
 still, with children as eager and youth as hot 
 as ever." 
 
 The Mother reflected. " Yes," she said, 
 no 
 
The TOWER 
 " so many of them are too hot and eager." 
 And yet, in her steady, self-restraining way, 
 she was herself the most progressive of 
 women. ..." Still, they must have their 
 way. If you educate, you must also give 
 liberty and responsibility. Better to trust 
 youth and leave it free than to try and stop 
 the storm by sitting on the barometer ! How- 
 ever, we haven't to think of that yet with 
 ours." And her needles clicked over a boy's 
 jersey. She, true to her sex, wanted to settle 
 the problem in hand. 
 
 " Haven't you settled that problem too ? " 
 I smiled after all my lively experiences in this 
 new world. 
 
 " No," said the Husband; " what we Eng- 
 lish scarcely do yet is to get at the whole 
 theory of the thing, to see it steadily and 
 whole. There's the aim to think of, whether 
 Goethe of the old Germany was not right after 
 all, that the forming of taste was more im- 
 portant than communicating knowledge; 
 whether all c the machinery of infection ' that 
 we call education, being indeed the only hope 
 of a nation and its most sacred concern, should 
 not be devised for character and ability and 
 handiness, rather than for knowledge pure and 
 simple, the foster-parent of cunning and 
 dodges. I'm thinking, I assure you, of what 
 I still see rather too much of — in the 
 market-place and the counting-house, in the 
 in 
 
The TOWER 
 
 manager's office and the board-room, although 
 they say it was twenty-fold worse just before 
 the War. I am no pessimist, and I steadily de- 
 cline to growl always about declining human 
 nature and our own neighbours' in particular. 
 But I note for the children's sake that the 
 dear things they are naturally made of — 
 modesty, faithfulness, lovingness and cheer- 
 fulness — are too often and too early lost. It 
 was unavoidable so soon after the break from 
 the stiff old education, and we must never go 
 back to the old parlour accomplishments for 
 the girls or teach boys that history began with 
 1066 and that they mustn't ask about more 
 than they are told. We teach the child to 
 'observe' instead of remembering; it 'ob- 
 serves ' us. We teach it to ' rely on itself ' • 
 it no longer c relies ' on us. We teach it to 
 c reason,' and it ' reasons out ' our argument 
 and differs. I recognise all this, and I rather 
 glory in the opportunity for those results. 
 But, for the sake of every nation of humanity, 
 we must not let them be the only results, still 
 less the aims, of education." 
 
 I listened and waited, and his wife smiled at 
 me as she let him utter these generalities, for 
 she knew that, man-like, he would get round 
 to the point again. He was fond of " clear- 
 ing the ground before building the hut." 
 
 " You see, fortunately or not, man has in 
 fact such an abnormally long youth compared 
 112 
 
The TOWER 
 with the other animals. Youth is the time or* 
 growth — of more than growth, of exuberance 
 and high spirits. It is the period of curiosity 
 and experiment, and in Britain above all, for 
 the sake of a wise training, these should never 
 be repressed, but rather encouraged. Do you 
 remember what they say the clever Japanese 
 visitor once said ? — " The Anglo-Saxon's 
 nature is like a white paper, while some other 
 nations' natures are like tinted papers. The 
 Anglo-Saxons would be absolutely fools if 
 they neglected their education, for they have 
 no special gifts (like the French for art) — 
 but they can be trained in any way in perfec- 
 tion." Well, I believe he was right, and I 
 would let the children plan and contrive at 
 every turn to realise each his own limitations 
 and to try to escape from them. To dam back 
 his inquisitive instincts by excessive rule is to 
 quell the springs of his activity, until at last, 
 finding that no demand is made upon them, 
 they cease to flow. It was to good purpose 
 that before the upheaval of the War a Gov- 
 ernment inspector reported a village school 
 where the sluices, though always regulated, 
 are permanently lifted, and the energies of the 
 child are ever moving, with a strong and 
 steady current, in whatever channel they may 
 have chanced to enter. So strong, indeed, 
 and so steady was the current, that it main- 
 tained its movement long after the child had 
 
 i 
 
The TOWER 
 
 left school. . . . The employers of labour in 
 the neighbourhood told him that there were 
 no slackers or loafers in the yearly output of 
 the school. For that was where, without fuss 
 of prizes or punishments, joy in the work, 
 pride in the school, devotion to a wise and 
 kind teacher, were the sufficient incentives to 
 happy industry." 
 
 " Do you remember," said the Mother, 
 " that Japanese system which your father used 
 to quote, saying that it must have meant as 
 much for the making of their heroic battles as 
 for their wonderfulwork in arts and crafts be- 
 fore they yielded to the corruption and folly of 
 some Western ways which spoiled Tokio with 
 a fatal touch of Manchester ? " 
 
 " Yes. You mean what Kikuchi spoke of 
 here in England," and the husband found the 
 book on a shelf at hand. " Japan is still true 
 to her old best self, for the War saved her 
 from decay when her best statesmen and those 
 of China brought them into the League of 
 Nations. There, at any rate in Japan, in all 
 the ordered cosmos of a well-laid and highly- 
 detailed scheme, you have the provision of a 
 multitudinous and an eager and nimble nation, 
 inspired still by honour of the family c house ' 
 and devotion to a sane patriotism for the train- 
 ing of its children. Even the few Private 
 Schools are under State-control, together with 
 all the range of Elementary, Middle and 
 114 
 
The TOWER 
 
 Higher Schools — for children of all stations 
 — with the branch schools, military, naval and 
 nautical — the Universities and Colleges. 
 You can read of the diligent care of detail — 
 the choice of site, in a healthy area, free from 
 noise, dust, smoke and everything injurious 
 to health; the heating stoves and ventilation; 
 the playgrounds; the apparatus — all those 
 things which at last are quite freely done in 
 our own schools and were for so long stupidly 
 neglected in the schools to which, from 
 plausible reasons of class-distinction, thou- 
 sands of the fathers and mothers of our race 
 were sent. Let me read to you this Preamble 
 of the Japanese Educational Code, thought 
 out in 1 87 1 — for I don't think you could 
 find a better one still in either hemisphere 
 for popular and modern purposes : — 
 
 The only way in which an individual can raise him- 
 self, manage his property and prosper in his business, 
 and so accomplish his career, is by cultivating his morals, 
 improving his intellect, and becoming proficient in 
 arts; the cultivation of morals, the improvement of intel- 
 lect, and proficiency in arts cannot be attained except 
 through learning. This is the reason why schools are 
 established; from language, writing, and reckoning for 
 daily use, to knowledge necessary for officials, farmers, 
 merchants, and artisans and craftsmen of every descrip- 
 tion, to laws, politics, astronomy, medicine, etc., in 
 fact, for all vocations of men, there is none that is not 
 to be acquired by learning. Every man only after 
 learning diligently, each according to his capacity, will 
 be able to increase hi? property and prosper in his busi- 
 
 "5 
 
The TOWER 
 
 ness. Hence knowledge may be regarded as the capital 
 for raising one's self; who can then do without learn- 
 Those who wander about homeless, suffer from 
 
 ingr 
 
 hunger, break up their houses, and ruin themselves, 
 come to such pass because they are without learning. 
 Although long time has elapsed since there have been 
 schools, through their being improperly administered, 
 people have made a mistake of thinking that learning is 
 a matter for those above " samurai " rank, and as for 
 farmers, artisans, and merchants, as also for women, 
 they have no idea of what learning is and think of it 
 as something beyond their sphere. Even among those 
 above " samurai " rank it is said that their learning is 
 for the sake of the State, and not realising that it is the 
 basis on which they are to raise themselves, they run 
 into mere sentence-reciting and phrase-making, and fall 
 into ways of empty theorising and vain talking so that 
 although their discourses sound profound, they cannot 
 be carried out in practice. All this is due to a long 
 continued bad custom, and this is why enlightenment 
 is not more widely propagated and so many people fall 
 into poverty, bankruptcy, and loss of the house. Men 
 must, therefore, acquire learning, and in learning must 
 not mistake its true purport. Now a system of educa- 
 tion has been determined at the Department of Educa- 
 tion, and various regulations will be published in due 
 course. It is intended that henceforth universally 
 (without any distinction of class or sex) in a village there 
 shall be no house without learning, and in a house no 
 individual without learning. Fathers or elder brothers 
 must take note of this intention, and bringing up their 
 children or younger brothers with warm feeling of love 
 must not fail to let them acquire learning. (As fof 
 higher learning, that depends upon the capacity of indi- 
 viduals, but it shall be regarded as a neglect of duty on 
 the part of fathers or elder brothers should they fail to 
 send young children to elementary school without dis- 
 tinction of sex.) 1 1 5 
 
The TOWER 
 
 Owing to the long continued bad habit of regarding 
 learning as a matter for those above " samurai " rank, 
 there are not a few who consider that, since their learn- 
 ing is for the sake of the State, they need not learn 
 unless they are supplied by the State not only with 
 expenses necessary for study, but also with food and 
 clothing, and so by neglecting learning spoil their whole 
 life. This is a great mistake; henceforth such vicious 
 custom must be done away with, and people in general 
 leaving all else aside must make every effort to apply 
 themselves to learning. 
 
 He passed me the book, saying I should 
 look at its Edicts and Proclamations, the re- 
 scripts which, upon the death of the remark- 
 able King in whose reign they were issued, 
 occasioned the claim of his successor that 
 "these measures in turn brought general 
 good to the country and enhanced its prestige 
 altogether," and elicited, as their Emperor lay 
 dying, such a tribute of popular devotion. In 
 that unhappy nineteenth century was there in 
 the Western world a King of a cultivated race 
 at whose passing a whole city would watch 
 and pray at the temples day and night, for 
 whom fishermen would make pilgrimage to 
 the capital with his favourite fish, and nuns 
 bring tortoises as symbols of longevity; 
 counter to whose wishes actors, geishas, and 
 wrestlers would close the theatres to swell the 
 crowd round the Palace, across the moat of 
 which numbers of schoolboys and schoolgirls 
 
The TOWER 
 
 would recite prayers for the safe recovery of 
 the Father of the People? 
 
 " And did all that serve you any purpose ? " 
 I asked, well remembering how impervious to 
 foreign ideas my fellow citizens were in my 
 own days, when the witty Frenchman de- 
 clared, " Oh ! you islanders, each of whom is 
 an island to himself! " 
 
 " Why, yes," said the husband, " we 
 found ourselves, under the stimulus of the 
 War, willing at last to look to a good pattern 
 provided for us by the lively people of the far 
 East, with whom one of the old accidents of 
 our history jumped us into alliance. With all 
 allowance for different clime and diverse faith, 
 art, and ethics, there seemed so much in 
 common between British and Japanese essen- 
 tials — shrewd and dogged patience in com- 
 merce, inventiveness in big feats of industry, 
 the independence of an island race, the love of 
 animals and flowers, that the Japanese — who 
 came on so fast, perilously fast, perhaps, as 
 many think — could teach much to us as apt 
 pupils when it was brought before us in ex- 
 change for what we gave them. . . ." 
 
 " The lesson was applied, of course, with- 
 out Japanese labels. Our leaders knew our 
 folk too well for that! There was at least 
 one Education Minister, who, for an Oxford 
 don, did wonders in a Yorkshire city, where, 
 as Vice-Chancellor, he was in frequent request 
 u8 
 
The TOWER 
 as arbitrator among the men of commerce, 
 just because his culture confirmed his equit- 
 able, just outlook. It was he who, when the 
 foundation-stones of our society were so 
 shaken, quietly but courageously relaid them 
 in his own department. He breathed a new 
 gospel into the old truism that education is 
 one of the good things of life to be more 
 widely shared among the children of the 
 country. He compelled the eager reformers 
 who clamoured at his door to see that if they 
 wanted to get the right spirit into the national 
 education, the machinery had first to be over- 
 hauled. He knew that what Labour suffered 
 from in England and what gave certain vices 
 to the Trade Unions was that the workers 
 had not been trained. He roundly told their 
 less-balanced leaders that true education was 
 not, and should never be directed to become, 
 mere propaganda for the abolition, say, of 
 wage slavery, however undesirable that wage 
 slavery might be. . . . He lent all the 
 warmth of his personal sympathy, the power 
 of his official status, to the labours of those 
 working men and women, few, but influential 
 through their courage and character, who were 
 more concerned with the problem how to 
 secure for the adult worker opportunities of 
 study and mental training alongside of his 
 wage-earning employment and in continued 
 comradeship with members of his own class; 
 119 
 
The TOWER 
 less concerned with the old ( educational 
 ladder ' theory and the itch for personal ad- 
 vancement into the better-paid ranks of in- 
 dustry or into professional life. Initiative, 
 courage, independence would all feed on such 
 comradeship — qualities springing in all 
 human breasts as constantly as hope, and the 
 more freely. Man's spirit, as he knew, could 
 be trusted to be for ever pioneering. To dis- 
 trust the self-confident or buoyant reach 
 towards the future was a hateful thing. . . ." 
 As the Father so talked the Mother slipped 
 to the children's dormitory lest a bell at the 
 door below should rouse them. 
 
 "I'll let him in," said the Father. "I 
 expect it is old Solon, on his way back from 
 the House." 
 
 At times in this way, it appears, these 
 neighbour-comrades met, the Father, an 
 actively busy engineer, but never imprisoned 
 by his toil, and the Minister, one of the 
 younger statesmen, his school friend, a man 
 favoured, but unspoiled, by Fortune, impa- 
 tient of hypocrisy in politics and self-seeking 
 in politicians, trained to discriminate between 
 men and measures by the legal work which he 
 had suddenly abandoned for public office, 
 trusted by all who knew him. 
 
 " My dear man ! " he cried, " I have great 
 news and must tell you and the Lady." 
 " A new Turner print " — she smiled at 
 120 
 
The TOWER 
 
 him, as she came to the door — " or only a 
 Government defeat? " 
 
 " Madam, I can only punish you by saying 
 that my news will be in all the papers to- 
 morrow, else I could not tell even you ! No, 
 it's splendid. The Guilds and Unions, to 
 whom we gave the pledge about it six years 
 ago, have all come into line at last. No ex- 
 emption from school attendance, except for 
 sickness, for any boy or girl under sixteen, and 
 part-time training for all right up to eighteen. 
 It is what we have been toiling for, and is now 
 assured, the thing almost that matters most, 
 for all that young life in its most plastic and 
 docile period." 
 
 " Tell our guest what you mean," said the 
 Father. " He is rather puzzled by what he 
 sees and hears about our schools." 
 
 " Well, briefly, what we have accomplished 
 since the War is this — always remembering 
 the pioneers of it! — To cultivate the children 
 for their lives, to teach them how to learn and 
 not stuff them with crude facts, we saw a 
 vision. We saw gently sloping planes for the 
 children to climb ever on and on, with ever 
 fresh relays, up the delectable mountains on 
 whose peaks — never to be reached by man or 
 woman — sit the figures of Pure Knowledge. 
 We saw the boys and the girls, in happy com- 
 radeship and vigour of health — else it were 
 folly to instruct their brains — growing and 
 121 
 
The TOWER 
 
 growing as young creatures should be let to 
 grow. We foresaw skill and mastery of 
 material and zeal of industry all on a higher 
 level and with a broadened base. We fore- 
 saw a moral training drawn not only from 
 physical drill and ordered games, but from the 
 food of the intellect as well, else we should 
 have our grown citizens still confusing ideas 
 of public duty and private amusements, unable 
 in later life to disentangle them. We foresaw 
 the State guiding, stimulating, and even con- 
 trolling — but not interfering locally, not un- 
 duly trenching on the liberty of judging on 
 the spot. 
 
 " And in detail it is this — thus and thus " — 
 and as Caesar must have done on the harbour 
 wall or young Napoleon on a drum-head, this 
 eager strategist handled imagined notes and 
 schemes. " For the infants we planned more 
 for eye and ear and hand than for the little 
 brain. We founded Nursery Schools for them 
 from two to six — oh, the struggle over that 
 six years' limit with the teachers! These 
 Baby Schools are voluntary — such happy 
 places. Without them half the boon of the 
 Schools for Mothers would be lost. Now, as I 
 tell you, the children from that age will be 
 obliged to come to the schools. Right through 
 to sixteen and until they are eighteen, they 
 must spend twenty hours a week in school and 
 not more than twenty-five at labour. We have 
 122 
 
The TOWER 
 
 been drawing up to that right through these 
 years — oh ! so slowly, and the battle has been 
 so hard. You see, it involved the whole ques- 
 tion of livelihood in its solution — the gradual 
 stoppage of the maintenance allowances which 
 the parents wanted until the Guilds secured 
 the family workers their pay, and the redistri- 
 bution of all the cost — our Central Govern- 
 ment bearing three-fourths of the cost of all 
 approved schemes of the local education 
 authority. 55 
 
 " You seem to have moved mountains, 55 I 
 laughed. 
 
 " Or got round them, 55 chuckled this 
 merry public servant. " The way we did it 
 was to divide England up into eight great 
 educational provinces : Greater London one, 
 Lancashire another, and so on, and a Uni- 
 versity to every province. It was grand how 
 Oxford and Cambridge stood the strain. You 
 shall see one of these days of your visit, if you 
 will spare it me, how it all works — each pro- 
 vince with its own administrative Council, its 
 representatives of its own University, and 
 every local education authority co-opting the 
 best men and women for its purposes in the 
 district and representatives of the teachers 
 as well. The secret of this plan 5 s success (it 
 was Haldane 5 s originally, and now the new 
 generation praises his name after the cruel 
 and mean injustice they did him in the War- 
 123 
 
The TOWER 
 
 time) is that these Councils consider their own 
 local schemes, the allocation of schools and 
 scholars, questions of salaries and pensions, 
 and the distribution both of teachers and of 
 grants. The general thinking, the theory of 
 the whole plan, is left to the Board of Educa- 
 tion, and well they do it, free from the 
 crowded administration and drowning detail 
 of the old days. Oh! we have something 
 worthy of England at last, the home of good 
 craftsmen and gay inventors. . . . And as 
 midnight is nearly striking I must leave you 
 with that ! " 
 
 The Mother was thinking of her own 
 children, but also of their Motherland, and 
 therefore willing for the hour to forget 
 the difficult, immediate problem of how to 
 choose among the many day-schools in the 
 great city for her own children — reluctant to 
 lose the real profit of school spirit and games- 
 comradeship absent from home-teaching, but 
 convinced that all barrack life is stunted in a 
 shut-in garden, and that with a sensible and 
 godly home for giving contact v/ith life's 
 broader currents and deep vitalities, the day- 
 school for both boys and girls supplies the 
 richer moral training. 
 
 " Yes," she said, " the school-rooms and 
 
 the gymnasia and the workshops are our real 
 
 c Dreadnoughts,' for the safety of our land, 
 
 for the well-being of our sons and daughters." 
 
 124 
 
The TOWER 
 
 " Lady, you speak well," said the Minister, 
 rising to go. " We woke the enthusiasm of 
 the people and used the opportunity." 
 
 Upstairs the Father and Mother looked at 
 the children, serene and happy in their deep 
 draught of sleeping, and prayed for their 
 future. 
 
 The Father lingered in his book-room to 
 sort his memoranda for the morrow's round 
 of work, and ended the long day with some 
 comfortable words from a friendly shelf. 
 
 Fie read Mazzini's letter to a parent, 
 anxious for his boy's training : — 
 
 Every man is a speciality, is capable of some definite 
 thing. You must try to discover that special tendency, 
 and then frame his education accordingly. After a 
 general teaching of those branches which are good for 
 any man, direct his studies towards the development of 
 that special tendency which you will have discovered. 
 Education means drawing out, educere, what is in the 
 boy : not creating in him what is not. You cannot 
 create. 
 
 But one thing is, must be, common to all. You 
 must give him a proper notion of what life is, and of 
 what the world in which he has been put for the fulfil- 
 ment of a task is. 
 
 Life is a duty, a function, a mission. For God's sake 
 do not teach him any Benthamite theory about happi- 
 ness, either individual or collective. A creed of indi- 
 vidual happiness would make him an egotist : a creed 
 of collective happiness will reach the same result soon 
 or late. . . . 
 
 Teach him that Life has no sense unless being a 
 task . . . that the basis of all Truth is the know- 
 125 
 
The TOWER 
 
 ledge of the Law of Life, which is indefinite Progres- 
 sion : that to this Law he must be a servant. . . . 
 
 Elementary astronomy, elementary geology, ought to 
 be taught as soon as possible. Then universal history, 
 then languages. 
 
 The difficult thing is to get the proper teach- 
 ing. . . . 
 
 I would not teach any positive religion; but the great 
 fundamental Trinity, God, the immortality of the soul, 
 the necessity of a religion as a common link of brother- 
 hood for mankind, grounded on the acknowledgment 
 of the Law of Progression. At a later period he will 
 choose. . . . 
 
 In one word, a religious conception of life — then a 
 full notion of the world he lives in — then the special 
 branch of activity to which he seems inclined. That 
 is the whole of education for your boy. 
 
 126 
 
§X. A MIDSUMMER FESTIVAL 
 
 LONDON still remains the hom- 
 ing centre for all our English-speak- 
 ing peoples to which Time's turning 
 wheel has brought so many changes. 
 London has always been beautiful 
 in June, not only in lyrical moments to stir 
 Wordsworth to a sonnet, but with a settled 
 peculiar amenity of bright greenery among 
 grey buildings and a gay movement of the 
 thronged thoroughfares; too attractive even 
 in the old days to let you be troubled about 
 what was hidden or suppressed, crushed or 
 destitute. 
 
 To-day, especially, I find London the 
 theatre of a great and stirring scene, so that the 
 City glows, body and spirit, with fervid and 
 articulate sensations such as come to a man or 
 woman on wedding morn or on the achieve- 
 ment of high purpose. 
 
 It is Britain's Midsummer Festival, the 
 latest of the quinquennial lustral ceremonies 
 with which the Mother City, like Athens of 
 old with her " Panathenia " of each fourth 
 year, celebrates the Past and, by a high act of 
 Present Service, passes into the Future. 
 
 From the great Park in the West, close to 
 127 
 
The TOWER 
 
 Kensington Palace, which has been happily 
 preferred as the London home of the titular 
 President of the Commonwealth, to the great 
 Park in the East, near the Shipping Docks, 
 where are set out the Music and Amusement 
 Halls and the Gymnasia and Playing-fields of 
 the Mother City's swarming people, the 
 Festival scene moves through the morning, 
 pausing at St. Paul's for the double Act of 
 Commemoration and ThankofFering. 
 
 Let us watch, as it approaches the majestic 
 Cathedral raised by Wren's genius to the 
 honour of God, the Pageant which thousands 
 of citizens from London itself and from the 
 other great cities and country shires of our 
 Islands have been watching along the wide 
 ways of the Parks on either side of Common- 
 wealth House (that of old was Buckingham 
 Palace) and through the broadened Strand, 
 around the clustered Colonial Offices, and in 
 the narrowing historic ways of the commer- 
 cial city; which thousands more will be watch- 
 ing down the tortuous streets of older London 
 as it brings a tantalising and yet ennobling 
 vision to the dwellers in those great tracts of 
 homes between Aldgate and the Docks, who 
 serve the laws of modern Industry. 
 
 I speak of no uncharted Atlantis, no un- 
 packed Utopia, and yet how much of the 
 noble and worthy Human Drama is found in 
 this processional scene ! 
 128 
 
The TOWER 
 
 For the waiting hours, massed choirs have 
 been submitting hymns and chorales to the 
 blue Heaven above from the broad steps of 
 the Cathedral and from its high flanking 
 towers. 
 
 These things shall be ! A loftier race 
 
 Than e'er the world hath known shall rise 
 
 With flame of freedom in their souls, 
 And light of science in their eyes. 
 
 And then Carpenter's 
 
 England, arise ! The long, long night is over — 
 and Whittier's hymn of patriotism : 
 
 Our thought of thee is glad with hope, 
 Dear country of our love and prayers; 
 
 The way is down no fatal slope, 
 But up to freer sun and airs. 
 
 Thrice, as the clock hours have struck a 
 stillness into the summer air, the clear voice of 
 a singing party and assisting trumpets have 
 fallen faintly down on attentive ears from the 
 very balcony above the dome, as when travel- 
 lers are welcomed from the summit of some 
 Bavarian Town Hall, or early townsfolk and 
 scholars once more gather round Magdalen 
 Tower at Oxford on a May morning. 
 
 But hark, ye folk ! 
 
 It is high noon, and a great stir comes from 
 the West, gently smiting the senses of the 
 dense spectators. Through the arch of the 
 noble Trophy which London's Art Schools 
 have adorned for the City Guilds, where an 
 129 K 
 
The TOWER 
 
 ugly little bridge used to span the bottom of 
 Ludgate Hill, come the swelling strains of 
 brass and drum. The jolly crowd on the 
 edges of the Hill is seen yielding to the 
 mounted constables — the patient Civic 
 Centaurs that alone remain to remind us of 
 the sorry spectacle of the long-abandoned 
 November " Shows." 
 
 As the " March " ends off for the climbing 
 of the Hill, and the Cathedral Front rises be- 
 fore their glad eyes, a chosen throng of chil- 
 dren — young London! — borne on a dozen 
 high-banked and easy-swinging waggons, 
 burst into 
 
 God of Britain, God of London, 
 Guarding all our People's needs — 
 
 and the Cathedral choirs respond in anti- 
 phony. 
 
 From now, the Progress flows on like a 
 gladdening tide. It is movement of banners 
 and music, changing cosmos of colour- 
 schemes and human groupings all the way. 
 Lithe lads and merry maids — their swinging 
 carriage and the glow of their limbs and 
 faces declaiming the value of the happy drill- 
 teams that they march in (the twenty vic- 
 torious companies of the year) — follow up 
 the cars of children, and how the people clap 
 them and think of their healthful promise! 
 
 Close after them, proclaimed in successive 
 130 
 
The TOWER 
 
 groups by high-borne symbols of the Instru- 
 ments of Education — a Triumph-Car of 
 Geometry, a Bower of Botany, an Astronomy 
 Camera, models of Architecture under a 
 wreathed screen of Town-Planning, the tabled 
 emblems of the Arts and Music and the 
 Natural Sciences, twain images of Religion 
 and Wisdom — march a multitude of students 
 of both sexes, chosen through the last five 
 years from London and Oxford, from Edin- 
 burgh and Cambridge, and Sheffield and 
 Bristol and all the other seats of the British 
 University : the heralds of the ever-new 
 learning, to-day's bearers of the lamps of the 
 old, old Knowledge. Each score represent- 
 ing a myriad of young Britons, and escorted by 
 comrades from the over-seas Dominions and 
 the other States of Europe, this joyous band 
 wakens a great ovation and kindles many 
 a veteran memory of struggling school- 
 conference and educational turmoil — there is 
 the air of a Revolution, hardly but gloriously 
 won. 
 
 Youths and maidens those — and what is 
 this steadier tramp and tread, with faces still 
 happy, but happy with a kind of grave dignity, 
 and a general mien and bearing as of real task- 
 bearers, of Labour in the actual toiling? 
 There is no make-believe in this carnival, for 
 it is a Pageant of Realities. These, then, 
 are the "Workers by brains and hands — dele-^ 
 131 
 
The TOWER 
 
 gates from the great Guilds and Trades 
 Societies, managers and operatives, shrewd 
 captains in industry and mastercraftsmen, 
 skilled toilers, the members of small work- 
 shops, rough navvies, apprentices, both lads 
 and girls (but none of the latter from pit or 
 chain-works or sweated tailoring), no mothers 
 (honour to them and praise to men!), of 
 children hardly any. Again, the emblems and 
 the banners, all proudly borne, symbolising 
 a varied production for service and use, pro- 
 claim the crafts and trades — railwaymen and 
 bakers, provisioners and packers, all the allied 
 servers of building, weaving, agriculture, 
 engineering and outfitting, miners and wharf- 
 ingers, dock-hands and bargees, clerks and 
 salesmen, printers and publishers, black- 
 smiths and tinsmiths — do you sometimes 
 think — O spectator! — of all the different 
 producers whose handiwork you really want 
 in this modern life, to say nothing of those 
 that toil over what is not really wanted by 
 either you or them ? Well, here, on this gay 
 June morning, they come to make hearty con- 
 fession and proclamation of their Labour, and 
 is it not well that they should — lest we forget 
 what is involved in the townsman's struggle 
 against Nature? This Progress of their 
 delegates helps the loyalty and goodwill of 
 workshop, counting-house, furnace, dock- 
 side, and pit-head, and gives a public sanction 
 132 
 
The TOWER 
 
 to Labour. This is the true National Service, 
 a cheerful conscription which he who shirks 
 is a waster, be he born in castle or cottage, 
 for all these, like them that follow so close 
 upon them — the doctors and the nurses, the 
 economists and the lawyers, the engineers and 
 architects, the artists and the learned pro- 
 fessors — have volunteered (for livelihood, no 
 doubt, and why not?), to serve the nation's 
 needs for thirty or forty years, two at least 
 spent in camp and training ground for 
 defence of the Tower of the Motherland. 
 That is why it is congruous at last for this 
 great chapter of the Progress to culminate 
 in this year's Votive Image of the Festival, 
 the prize-winning sculpture to show forth 
 " The Nation " which each fifth year, after 
 its benediction in the Cathedral, shall be set 
 in a leading town in the shires — to stand 
 for a memory and a trumpet-call to all who 
 see it. 
 
 The Image is escorted round its ox-drawn 
 car — and how the people cheer them! — by 
 the twenty winners, since the last Festival, of 
 the Silver-Medals for heroic thoughts and 
 deeds — a stalwart sailor, a brave nursemaid, 
 a carter, a song-maker, a street constable, a 
 harbour-master, a surgeon, a sewerman, a sig- 
 nalman, a peacemaker, and the rest of them: 
 there are three missing, but their sons or their 
 friends carry their wreaths of laurel. 
 133 
 
The TOWER 
 
 These are a folk who prove that War is 
 not wanted to make heroes. The dogmas of 
 a Treitschke about " a drastic medicine for 
 ailing humanity," or a Bernhardi on War's 
 " biological justice," have been discarded 
 upon the scrap-heap of modern environment. 
 This healthy people have insisted upon the 
 prevention of the moods and modes by which 
 autocrats and profiteerers were shown to have 
 created the tragic folly of the great War. But 
 man cannot in a generation root out the mis- 
 chief of a century or compete with Providence 
 which provided evil in his constitution. 
 Therefore, as I am telling you of a day when 
 humanity is still, by its birthright, aiming at 
 the unattainable goals of universal brother- 
 hood and love, you will not be surprised, but 
 rather heartened, if I narrate that at the 
 next stage of the pageant I hear the regular 
 tramp of strong men and the clatter of keen 
 horses. These are the Defenders, battalions 
 of territorial " foot and horse," proud of their 
 smart trappings, prouder still, with a sturdy 
 sincerity, of their months of willing service 
 (camp-toil, camp-comradeship), conscious in 
 their new generation of the need to learn hard 
 drill and healthy drudgery, to bear and tug at 
 burdens in hot or in dirty weather, to risk 
 limb and life itself if Home Defence or a High 
 Crusade should call for it. 
 
 Our island-crowd still loves a sailor. Pin- 
 134 
 
The TOWER 
 nace and Lifeboat and Trawler and Hydro- 
 plane, each with its crew, come up the Hill to 
 tell a tale of daring to the huzzaing crowd, so 
 that the very shire-horses that draw the lorries 
 seem infected with the joy of it. A company 
 of jolly mariners, swinging as easy as the sea, 
 heralds the River Pageant of the later day, of 
 which you shall presently hear. 
 
 The happy crowd that hangs from windows 
 and lines the pavements is now at top pitch 
 of eager welcome. A hearty cheer goes to 
 the three Pageant Masters on their steeds, each 
 with his mounted Messenger — the Master of 
 the Progress, he of the Music, and he of the 
 Decoration. 
 
 There follow them the chanting priests and 
 censor-acolytes of Britain's Great Christian 
 Church, disestablished into greater honour, 
 disendowed for juster freedom. The Bishops 
 come nobly up, some in rich copes and vest- 
 ments, to honour the Lord God Omnipotent, 
 some in simpler habit, like a Savonarola or a 
 Wesley, as they think fit to see the call of their 
 Master. All around and behind them move 
 the Alms-Gatherers, collecting into a Treasury 
 Waggon all the little bags and packets of 
 money that the spectators along the route 
 contribute with ready freedom to the great 
 Festival Offering for the Poor and Sick of the 
 State Almshouses and Hospitals. 
 
 And now, with proper pomp and honour, 
 
 *3S 
 
The TOWER 
 
 come the President and Governors of the 
 Commonwealth, the trustees of our demo- 
 cracy, the ministers of our strangely balanced 
 constitution — in spirit as well as in fact more 
 representative than of old, and still, in part, 
 for the high uses of home and imperial and 
 international ceremony and symbolism, here- 
 ditary, as belongs to a royal line of Kings, 
 with a reasonable adjustment of homage and 
 reward to merit and service rendered — a task 
 not so difficult as you might suppose, with 
 prepossessions of authority frankly removed 
 and sham ornament and offices abolished. The 
 President's Councillors are, outwardly as of 
 old, so many Secretaries of State, the people's 
 representatives,chosen and exchanged through 
 the free play of talent and emulation, crossed 
 a little by the caprices of elections, even with 
 the franchise extended to trades and profes- 
 sions, but approaching so much nearer to the 
 best standard of the right men and women for 
 the right offices, that you would say a genuine 
 aristocracy was at work for the happiness of 
 the State. And you can tell that these who 
 make the Government give satisfaction to the 
 people from the hearty greetings that attend 
 them and because, reasonably dignified and 
 modest withal in their bearing, they look 
 pleased at their reception and not ashamed to 
 take it. It was not always so with politicians ! 
 Following this central group of the Execu- 
 136 
 
The TOWER 
 tive Government and Parliamentarians come 
 the Judges, grave and experienced arbiters of 
 the tangled quarrels and disputes which no 
 simple or complex society can avoid ; sagacious 
 and sensible critics of human foibles and delin- 
 quencies; accurate measurers and dispensers of 
 our now codified Law, simplified each twenty 
 years out of the complex of cases and 
 precedents. 
 
 And behind them, with a well-blazoned 
 banner from each county (we reckon more by 
 the shires now than by cities), step the mayors 
 and councillors and magistrates of municipal 
 life, many honoured women among them, 
 delegates by ballot of the worthy and well- 
 paid multitude who, for the next five years, 
 and perhaps for as long and as long again, 
 will administer to the health and safety and 
 education of the people. 
 
 And at last, heralded by gay marching 
 music and alternating chants, come the two 
 closing companies of this Civic Pageant, ac- 
 claimed by loud and echoing hand-claps and 
 cries of welcome. First, a phalanx (so certain 
 and proud is their stepping) of the Veterans 
 and Reservists of the Army of Labour, of 
 them that have by brains and hands, as em- 
 ployers or employed, managers and operatives, 
 wise captains of industry and master-crafts- 
 men, skilled toilers and rough navvies, fought 
 the good fight, and are now, either at slackened 
 137 
 
The TOWER 
 
 speed or in trust-posts on the trade executives 
 of Guilds or co-operative unions, or as 
 honoured pensioners, watching what the 
 youngsters can do; the men whose talk fights 
 the old fight again and thanks Heaven that 
 the new one is not easier, but juster. And 
 after them, fenced off by the mounted 
 constables from the buzzing crowd of on- 
 lookers that swarm over the route, comes the 
 merry noise of the concluding Triumph, six 
 joyful waggons of Mothers and Children, 
 even the tired ones happy-looking, as proud 
 as any in the Festival to represent a great 
 Truth — Nature's richest and hopefullest 
 Reality — Motherhood with its heroic pain 
 and anxious tears; Motherhood quietly glory- 
 ing in Sons and Daughters. 
 
 Such a Progress, spelling democracy and 
 not dynasty, no starved survival, but a vivid 
 expression of the modern nation, lets its idea 
 out upon a wide and permeating flow of active 
 beneficence. With far-felt tremors beyond the 
 centre of the day's actors and spectators, its 
 influence wells and pulses to uplifting ends. 
 
 As evening begins to come from the east 
 the River Pageant is enacted. 
 
 At another time, if you do not know of 
 
 it, you shall hear of the great solemn rite in 
 
 the Cathedral, with the benediction of the 
 
 Image between moving chants and hymns of 
 
 138 
 
The TOWER 
 
 praise and passages of deep, worshipful silence 
 and thanksgiving. And if five years on you 
 are a councillor or a hero, or perhaps, best of 
 all, a youth or a maid, and so take a place 
 in the Progress, why, then you will know for 
 yourself what happens and how the Service 
 purges and kindles your soul. And you will 
 recount to your friends in Hampstead or in 
 Woolwich or in Fulham, it may be, or in the 
 Midlands, or in Wessex or in Northumbria, 
 how the President rendered up the People's 
 thanks and the People's Vow to God through 
 the mediation of the Priests; how, as on 
 another great day, there rose, chanted by half 
 the choir, those words of noblest poetry : 
 
 " A new commandment — a new command- 
 ment, I give unto you. . . ." To be an- 
 swered by the voices on the other side : " That 
 ye love — ye love one another ! " 
 
 And again: "7 have called you friends. 
 Te are my friends ." With the reply : " If 
 ye do the things which I command you." 
 
 And yet again : " The words that I speak 
 unto you." . . . They — they are spirit; and 
 
 they are life ! " 
 
 and how, after a moment's silence, all the 
 voices gathering into one harmony, sent the 
 last versicle ringing through the arches of the 
 choir and among the springing tracery above 
 the clerestory : 
 
 139 
 
The TOWER 
 
 " Lord, to whom shall we gof . . . Thou — 
 Thou hast the words of eternal life I " 
 
 And now all the great membership of the 
 Pageant streams through the wide doors to 
 take noonday rest and refreshment before 
 carrying its lustral Triumph along the dense- 
 packed ways to the Docks of the Port of 
 London, thence to disperse homewards after 
 giving the President and the Governors to 
 their splendid Barge. With the Marine 
 Pageant on the Thames the Day's Progressing 
 will end, the Ministers disembarking at West- 
 minster to attend the final Benediction of the 
 Festival in the Abbey, and the people to mass 
 in the public Places for the gorgeous illumina- 
 tions and the stirring strains of national music. 
 
 Well, as I have said, the evening begins 
 to come from the East, and with it the stream- 
 ing and eddying flood-tide. All up the Pool, 
 and as far as the first Bridge, the full-throated 
 cheering of a host of seamen, Britons and 
 other mariners who are the carriers of a 
 world-wide export and import commerce of 
 every race and clime, acclaim the great Barge. 
 Sped easily by the double oarage of fifty water- 
 men, with musicians at the prow to play the 
 National hymns, and on the dais astern the 
 Nation's chosen rulers to take the homage 
 of the seas for our Islands, it passes, a rich 
 gem, with garlands and bunting reflected in 
 the tide's opal setting, up the centre of the 
 foirway . 1 40 
 
The TOWER 
 
 Within the first bridge (the outer gate, as 
 it were, to the home-citadel of this happier 
 land) begins the last ovation of the day's 
 Festival. On the Southern bank, now as 
 well as on the Northern, rise noble buildings 
 — the separate offices of imperial and muni- 
 cipal government — set spaciously in well- 
 planned gardens, much as Wren would have 
 set the Halls of the City Guilds and as, in- 
 deed, the gardens of the Temple are still set 
 out. From and through the wide regions 
 of London beyond the Embankments has 
 poured a huge and eager concourse, ranged 
 now along two miles of either shore on slop- 
 ing banks of timber. And between it, on 
 either side, and the middle fairway, lie at their 
 anchor long lines of smaller shipping and 
 pleasure craft, all deftly ordered between the 
 armoured boats that are the British contribu- 
 tion to the police-navy of the leagued 
 nations, half from the Home Fleets, and the 
 others, as their flags proclaim them, from 
 Overseas, from the Free States and Colonies 
 of the Anglo-Saxon Commonwealth greeting 
 the Folk of their Mother-Country. 
 
 The pastoral poet, the monk, the misan- 
 thrope, the chemist, might all, for their vary- 
 ing good reasons, prefer a different scene. 
 
 But these, too, like the philosophers that 
 may lean on wayside railings to gaze at a fine 
 piece of navvy labour, like the priest brought 
 141 
 
The TOWER 
 from his holy closet to his gate as the mock 
 bravura of a travelling circus wakes up the 
 village green, will be round on the edges of 
 this great acclaiming crowd. For it is a dra- 
 matic episode apt to stir wonder at Man's 
 busy struggles with the forces of Fate. The 
 physical scene owes to great Nature, with her 
 disposition of sloping hills and ^curving 
 stream under the blue midsummer dome, 
 whatever of wholeness and congruity it has 
 for the eye to gaze upon. And it is Man who 
 has flung his bridges, levelled his great flank- 
 ing roadways and, on south side now as well 
 as north, with cunning mind of architect and 
 sweat- toil of labourer, raised the storied hives 
 of industry and of administration. To-day it 
 is great holiday, and who shall grudge it, to 
 starve a people of its vision and rob them of 
 a big communal festival? To-morrow we 
 shall all drop back to work — in counting- 
 house, factory, home, workshop, magazine, 
 law-court, laboratory, engine-room, granary, 
 dock and building shed, conscious, a 
 little more keenly, a little more warmly, 
 of the enfolding City, of the island- 
 nation of Britain like a Tower in 
 the sea, of the kindred race beyond and 
 around the oceans, of the Human Brother- 
 hood which man is for ever gathering into 
 closer focus. We do not think of it, as the 
 merry noise of the festival music smites our 
 142 
 
 
The TOWER 
 ears, as the delighted eye picks out its own 
 pictures of holiday spectators, a canopied 
 balcony, a bridge arch wreathed with gay 
 bunting, a patrol boat saluting a Canadian 
 gunboat, a Natal pinnace greeting its Vic- 
 torian neighbour. We do not think of it at 
 the moment — unless the pastoral poet, the 
 monk, the misanthrope, and the chemist are 
 thinking of it, as they probably are ! 
 
 But the group of Ministers on the 
 barge, which now swims forward on the tide 
 like some great, proud swan, are thinking of 
 it, tired as they be, but cheerful still, with the 
 long day's ceremony. For they are the 
 Governors of the Commonwealth, and, for all 
 the suspicious yappings and tricky subterfuges 
 that always attend public servants, they are the 
 strong men, observing honour and fidelity to 
 the public weal in a fierce light. They see be- 
 hind and beyond the palpable scene — they feel 
 it, and they know that thought and labour at 
 home and overseas, in the towns, and through 
 the countryside, on the veldt, in the cotton 
 fields and rubber plantations, on the sheep 
 farms, in under-mines, and in many a noisy 
 city are contributing to this Festival, and that 
 the people hunger and so are fed. It is theirs 
 *o govern and obtain fair-dealing, avoiding 
 war by peace, preventing trouble by goodwill, 
 patient but tenacious of all that is just and 
 sound both in thought and in courageous 
 
 H3 
 
The TOWER 
 
 action, uncompromising in love of the good 
 and in rejection of the bad. 
 
 So at last in my Dream, before the fresh air 
 of the sunlit morning revived my senses to 
 remind me that the Vision of to-day is the Fact 
 of to-morrow, I seemed to echo the prayer of 
 the Indian poet of our modern time : 
 
 Where the mind is without fear and the head is held 
 high; 
 
 Where knowledge is free; 
 
 Where the world has not been broken up into fragments 
 by narrow domestic walls; 
 
 Where words come out from the depth of truth; 
 
 Where tireless striving stretches its arm towards 
 perfection ; 
 
 Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way 
 into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; 
 
 Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever- 
 widening thought and action, 
 
 Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country 
 awake. 
 
 M tie PELICAN PRESS, Gougk Square, Fleet Street, E.C 
 
THE NEW BRITAIN 
 
 EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS 
 
 " An anticipatory description of a Britain thirty years hence, with the 
 items of a new simple democratic programme of a purified community." 
 
 The Times, 
 "It is all so practical and so well within our reach." 
 
 The Challenge, 
 
 "The chief object of the book is to portray the changes brought about 
 in the industrial system, the new type of town arising therefrom, and the 
 revival of the countryside. . . . Few, T think, could read- ' A Midsummei 
 Festival ' without emotion and a wish that they might live to witness anc 
 take part in such a festival." 
 
 J. F. Green, M.P., in The Tositivist %eyiew 
 
 " If this country of ours fifty or sixty years hence will be anything lik< 
 the picture given by this ingenious, scholarly, cultured and delightfu 
 writer, it will be near enough Utopia to merit the name." 
 
 The Scotsman 
 
 " It is an England that could blossom out of the present, if only th< 
 spirit and the intelligence of man have been sufficiently quickened by thi 
 scourge of War. . . . Within these stimulating pages the reader wil 
 discover the secret of the metamorphosis." 
 
 Welsh Outlook 
 
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