xample, the boundary of the Essex
parishes of Newton and Widdington looks as though it had been sketched
out by a drunken man in a runaway cab with a broken spring.

This Bocking-Braintree main road is, it happens, an old Stane Street,
along which Roman legions marched to clean up the councils and clerks of
the British tribal system two thousand years ago, and no doubt an
historian could spin delightful consequences; this does not alter the
fact that these quaint complications in English affairs mean in the
aggregate enormous obstruction and waste of human energy. It does not
alter the much graver fact, the fact that darkens all my outlook upon
the future, that we have never yet produced evidence of any general
disposition at any time to straighten out or even suspend these fumbling
intricacies and ineptitudes. Never so far has there appeared in British
affairs that divine passion to do things in the clearest, cleanest,
least wasteful, most thorough manner that is needed to straighten out,
for example, these universal local tangles. Always we have been content
with the old intricate, expensive way, and to this day we follow it....

And what I want to know, what I would like to feel much surer about than
I do is, is this in our blood? Or is it only the deep-seated habit of
long ages of security, long years of margins so ample, that no waste
seemed altogether wicked. Is it, in fact, a hopeless and ineradicable
trait that we stick to extravagance and confusion?

What I would like to think possible at the present time, up and down the
scale from parish to province, is something of this sort. Suppose the
clerk of Braintree went to the clerk of Bocking and said: "Look here,
one of us could do the work of both of us, as well or better. The easy
times are over, and offices as well as men should be prepared to die for
their country. Shall we toss to see who shall do it, and let the other
man go off to find something useful to do?" Then I could believe. Such
acts of virtue happen in the United States. Here is a quotation from the
New York _World_ of February 15th, 1916:

"For two unusual acts Henry Bruere may be remembered by New York longer
than nine days. Early in his incumbency he declared that his office was
superfluous and should be abolished, the Comptroller assuming its
duties. He now abolishes by resignation his own connection with it, in
spite of its $12,000 salary."

Suppose the people of Braintree and Bocking, not