pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work.
But I am not concerned with the defense of small proprietorship,
but merely with the fact that it exists almost everywhere except
in England. It is also true, however, that this estate of small
possession is attacked everywhere today; it has never existed
among ourselves, and it may be destroyed among our neighbors.
We have, therefore, to ask ourselves what it is in human
affairs generally, and in this domestic ideal in particular,
that has really ruined the natural human creation,
especially in this country.

Man has always lost his way. He has been a tramp ever since Eden;
but he always knew, or thought he knew, what he was looking for.
Every man has a house somewhere in the elaborate cosmos;
his house waits for him waist deep in slow Norfolk rivers
or sunning itself upon Sussex downs. Man has always been
looking for that home which is the subject matter of this book.
But in the bleak and blinding hail of skepticism to which he has
been now so long subjected, he has begun for the first time
to be chilled, not merely in his hopes, but in his desires.
For the first time in history he begins really to doubt the object
of his wanderings on the earth. He has always lost his way;
but now he has lost his address.

Under the pressure of certain upper-class philosophies
(or in other words, under the pressure of Hudge and Gudge)
the average man has really become bewildered about the goal of
his efforts; and his efforts, therefore, grow feebler and feebler.
His simple notion of having a home of his own is derided as bourgeois,
as sentimental, or as despicably Christian. Under various