cherish? It is hard to estimate what grains of precious metal may
not be found in a mud torrent of human production on so large a
scale, but will any one, a hundred years from now, consent to live
in the houses the Victorians built, travel by their roads or
railways, value the furnishings they made to live among or esteem,
except for curious or historical reasons, their prevalent art and
the clipped and limited literature that satisfied their souls?

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

Well, we have to do better. Failure is not failure nor waste wasted