Excerpt from Modern England as Seen by an Englishwoman

Whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land, and may be seen in England long after the Empire has perished and every works in England has ceased to function, for centuries the one eternal sight of England. The wild anemones in the woods in April, the last load at night of hay being drawn down a lane as the twilight comes on, when you can scarcely distinguish the figures of the horses as they take it home to the farm, and above all, most subtle, most penetrating, and most moving, the smell of wood smoke coming up in an autumn evening. These are the things that make England.' Make England for some of us; but not for all, not for most. They are not - as Lord Baldwin went on to point out - the childish inheritance of the majority of our people who to - day are bred to the street; their childish inheritance is tram, tube, and motor-bus, not the plough team breasting the hill. That speech, moreover, was delivered in 1924, and in the years that have elapsed since 1924. The sound of hammer on anvil and scythe on Whetstone may have become less familiar even to the countryman; agriculture also is suffering its mechanical changes - all the more swiftly because labour in the field is not popular with youth, and the town, as ever, beckons it away from the countryside. The Baldwin England is not that of industrial Yorkshire and Lancashire or of London's swarming millions; who, judging by their manner of spending holidays, would soon be oppressed by its quiet. NO need to pity them if they have what suits them best; if for them England is the town and the town is England.' To each man according to his taste!

Not that village England of to-day is what the towns man often imagines it, a backwater stagnating in dullness; the motor-bus has linked it with the outside world, as represented by the nearby towns, their shops, their 'pictures, ' and their dance-halls. Dancing, nowadays, is a general accomplishment, confined to no district or class; even the 'special Areas' have their regular three penny and sixpenny dances and the village can jazz it with the best. And few, I imagine, have deserved more gratitude from their fellow-creatures than the promoters of Women's Institutes; which have brought interest and pleasure to a class that badly needed them - the hard working women of the countryside; and which, more over, have saved alive old inherited handicrafts and local arts of needlework which, without encouragement, would soon have passed and been forgotten. But even though modernity is stirring in the village, the' real modern England is essentially urban, living by the office, the factory, the shop. Liverpool Street of a morning, when the suburban torrent pours out of the trains, sweeps through the station, and spreads about the City; a tide of humanity, vast and indistinguishable, which with evening will again gather volume and flow to its dor mitory suburbs! That is one aspect of England and a typical aspect; more so to-day than the hay - cart drawn down the lane in twilight or the autumn scent of wood smoke.

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