aloud by confident
politicians and churchfolk. But I think they know well enough that
they always failed to get anywhere near what mind we have. There is a
reason for it, of course. Think of honest and sociable Mary Ann, of
Pottles Rents, E., having been alarmed by the behaviour of good
society, as it is betrayed in the popular picture Press, making odd
calls in Belgravia (the bells for visitors, too), to bring souls to God.

My parish, to strangers, must be opaque with its indifference. It
stares beyond the interested visitor, in the way the sad and
disillusioned have, to things it supposes a stranger would not
understand if he were told. He has reason, therefore, to say we are
dull. And Dockland, with its life so uniform that it could be an
amorphous mass overflowing a reef of brick cells, I think would be
distressing to a sensitive stranger, and even a little terrifying, as
all that is alive but inexplicable must be. No more conscious purpose
shows in our existence than is seen in the coral polyp. We just go on
increasing and forming more cells. Overlooking our wilderness of tiles
in the rain--we get more than a fair share of rain, or else the sad
quality of wet weather is more noticeable in such a place as ours--it
seems a dismal affair to present for the intelligent labours of mankind
for generations. Could nothing better have been done than that? What
have we been busy about?

Well, what are people busy about anywhere? Human purpose here has been
as blind and sporadic as it is at Westminster, unrelated to any fixed
star, lucky to fill the need of the day, building without any distant
design, flowing in bulk through the lowest channels that offered. As
elsewhere, it is obstructed by the unrecognized mistakes of its past.
Our part of London, like Kensington or Islington, is but the formless
accretion of countless swarms of life which had no common endeavour;
and so here we are, Time's latest deposit, the vascular stratum of this
area of the earth's rind, a sensitive surface flourishing during its
day on the piled strata of the dead. Yet this is the reef to which I
am connected by tissue and bone. Cut the kind of life you find in
Poplar and I must bleed. I cannot detach myself, and write of it.
Like any other atom, I would show the local dirt, if examined. My hand
moves, not loyally so much as instinctively, to impulses which come
from beneath and so out of a stranger's knowledge; out of my own, to