te than its
neighbour, has no dustman apparently, and is left with the tin on its
hands. It can either bury it in its garden--if it has a garden--take it
out for a walk wrapped in paper and drop it quietly in a ditch, if
possible in the Braintree area, or build a cairn with it and its
predecessors and successors in honour of the Local Government Board
(President L5,000, Parliamentary Secretary L1,500, Permanent Secretary
L2,000, Legal Adviser L1,000 upward, a total administrative expenditure
of over L300,000 ...). In death Bocking and Braintree are still divided.
They have their separate cemeteries....

Now to any disinterested observer there lies about the Braintree-Bocking
railway station one community. It has common industries and common
interests. There is no _octroi_ or anything of that sort across the
street. The shops and inns on the Bocking side of the main street are
indistinguishable from those on the Braintree side. The inhabitants of
the two communities intermarry freely. If this absurd separation did not
exist, no one would have the impudence to establish it now. It is
wasteful, unfair (because the Bocking piece is rather better off than
Braintree and with fewer people, so that there is a difference in the
rates), and for nine-tenths of the community it is more or less of a
nuisance.

It is also a nuisance to the passing public because of such
inconvenience as the asymmetrical main road. It hinders local
development and the development of a local spirit. It may, of course,
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
industr