ose soldiers in their blue "slops," with a hand gone there
and a leg gone here, and this and that grievous disability, all carrying
on so cheerfully?

Values are queer in this world. We are accustomed to exalt those who can
say "bo" to a goose; but that gift of expression which twines a halo
round a lofty brow is no guarantee of goodness in the wearer. The
really good are those plucky folk who plod their silent, often
suffering, generally exploited ways, from birth to death, out of reach
of the music of man's praise.

The first thing each child cripple makes here is a little symbolic
ladder. In making it he climbs a rung on the way to his sky of
self-support; and when at last he leaves this home, he steps off the top
of it into the blue, and--so they say--walks there upright and
undismayed, as if he had never suffered at Fate's hands. But what do he
and she--for many are of the pleasant sex--think of the sky when they
get there; that dusty and smoke-laden sky of the industrialism which
begat them? How can they breathe in it, coming from this place of
flowers and fresh air, of clean bright workshops and elegant huts, which
they on crutches built for themselves?

Masters of British industry, and leaders of the men and women who slave
to make its wheels go round, make a pilgrimage to this spot, and learn
what foul disfigurement you have brought on the land of England these
last five generations! The natural loveliness in this Heritage is no
greater than the loveliness that used to be in a thousand places which
you have blotted out of the book of beauty, with your smuts and wheels,
your wires and welter. And to what end? To manufacture crippled
children, and pale, peaky little Cockneys whose nerves are gone; (and,
to be sure, the railways and motor cars which will bring you here to see
them coming to life once more in sane and natural surroundings!) Blind
and deaf and dumb industrialism is the accursed thing in this land and
in all others.

If only we could send all our crippled soldiers to relearn life, in
places such as this; if, instead of some forty or fifty, forty or fifty
thousand could begin again, under the gaze of that white windmill! If
they could slough off here not only those last horrors, but the dinge
and drang of their upbringing in towns, where wheels go round, lights
flare, streets reek, and no larks sing, save some little blinded victim
in a cage. Poor William Blake:

"I will not cease from fighting