appeal perhaps to the humorous outlook of the followers of Mr. G.K.
Chesterton and Mr. Belloc, who believe that this war is really a war in
the interests of the Athanasian Creed, fatness, and unrestricted drink
against science, discipline, and priggishly keeping fit enough to join
the army, as very good fun indeed, good matter for some jolly reeling
ballad about Roundabout and Roundabout, the jolly town of Roundabout;
but to anyone else the question of how it is that this wasteful
Bocking-Braintree muddle, with its two boards, its two clerks, its two
series of jobs and contracts, manages to keep on, was even before the
war a sufficiently discouraging one.

It becomes now a quite crucial problem. Because the muddle between the
sides of the main road through Bocking and Braintree is not an isolated
instance; it is a fair sample of the way things are done in Great
Britain; it is an intimation of the way in which the great task of
industrial resettlement that the nation must face may be attempted.

It is--or shall I write, "it may be"?

That is just the question I do not settle in my mind. I would like to
think that I have hit upon a particularly bad case of entangled local
government. But it happens that whenever I have looked into local
affairs I have found the same sort of waste and--insobriety of
arrangement. When I started, a little while back, to go to Braintree to
verify these particulars, I was held up by a flood across the road
between Little Easton and Dunmow. Every year that road is flooded and
impassable for some days, because a bit of the affected stretch is under
the County Council and a bit under the Little Easton Parish Council, and
they cannot agree about the contribution of the latter. These things
bump against the most unworldly. And when one goes up the scale from the