ial resettlement that the nation must face may be attempted.

It is--or shall I write, "it may be"?

That is just the question I do not settle in my mind. I would like to
think that I have hit upon a particularly bad case of entangled local
government. But it happens that whenever I have looked into local
affairs I have found the same sort of waste and--insobriety of
arrangement. When I started, a little while back, to go to Braintree to
verify these particulars, I was held up by a flood across the road
between Little Easton and Dunmow. Every year that road is flooded and
impassable for some days, because a bit of the affected stretch is under
the County Council and a bit under the Little Easton Parish Council, and
they cannot agree about the contribution of the latter. These things
bump against the most unworldly. And when one goes up the scale from the
urban district and rural district boundaries, one finds equally crazy
county arrangements, the same tangle of obstacle in the way of quick,
effective co-ordinations, the same needless multiplicity of clerks, the
same rich possibilities of litigation, misunderstanding, and deadlocks
of opinion between areas whose only difference is that a mischievous
boundary has been left in existence between them. And so on up to
Westminster. And to still greater things....

I know perfectly well how unpleasant all this is to read, this outbreak
at two localities that have never done me any personal harm except a
little mud-splashing. But this is a thing that has to be said now,
because we are approaching a crisis when dilatory ways, muddle, and
waste may utterly ruin us. This is the way things have been done in
England, this is our habit of procedure, and if they are done in this
way after the war this Empire is going to smash.

Let me add at once that it is quite possible that things are done almost
as badly or quite as badly in Russia or France or Germany or America; I
am drawing no comparisons. All of us human beings were made, I believe,
of very similar clay, and very similar causes have been at work
everywhere. Only that excuse, so popular in England, will not prevent a
smash if we stick to the old methods under the stresses ahead. I do not
see that it is any consolation to share in a general disaster.

And I am sure that there must be the most delightful and picturesque
reasons why we have all this overlapping and waste and muddle in our
local affairs; why, to take another e