d trouble about. In the country one reads, not
skims, the daily paper; and if one's comments are leisurely, perhaps
they are all the better. At any rate one is not tempted to see the end
of the world in a strike, or a second Bonaparte in Signor d'Annunzio.
To me that poet seems rather a comic-opera brigand. I suspect him of
a green velvet jacket with a two-inch tail. But if you regard him
_sub specie eternitatis_, then I fear we must see in him all Italy
in epitome. That was how Italy went to war--but you must live in the
country to understand things like that, out of range of the tumult and
the shouting.

No more of Signor d'Annunzio here or elsewhere in these pages; but of
ourselves and our needs somewhat. Nobody could have lived through last
year without considering anxiously whither we are tending and with
what pretence. As the occasion moved me I have said my say about those
matters, and here the reader will have as much of it as I am ready
just now to give him. This is perhaps some sort of an apology for
what may be found hereafter of a hortatory kind. I may be charged with
wanting to do people "good." Well, if trying to make them happy is
trying to do them good, then I confess the charge. There is no doubt
whatever that they are not happy now. They hate too many people, they
pant and toil after the wrong things; they serve false gods and forget
the true ones. That is what we think about it in the country; and I am
of the country's opinion.

We need, it seems to me, many things--religion, love, work,
seriousness and so on; but what we need most of all, as I believe, is
to wash our hands. For five years they have been groping and wrenching
in the vitals of other people. They are foul and we are still drunk
with the reek. In God's name, let us wash and then we can begin to
build up the world again. We see the need of that out in the country,
but so far as I can judge by what I read or have seen of London,
there's no notion of it there.

But there's not much about London in this book.

CHANGE AND THE PEASANTRY

A book which I shall never willingly be without, one of my minor
classics, is _Idlehurst_. Published in 1898, its author John Halsham,
it has a touch upon country things, the penetrating, pitiful and _tant
soit peu_ condescending touch upon them of one who is both scholar and
recluse, fastidious but discerning. He reads our earth, cloudscape,
landscape, season, foison, man and beast of the field,