or to ask advice. The
vicar and the minister are my good friends, and, I am glad to say,
each other's. The farmers understand my ways (it is as much as I can
expect of them), and the labourers like them. All this keeps the
pores of the mind open; you cannot stagnate if you are useful to
other people. Nor--unless you are a fool--can you be strict with your
categories. The more you know of men and systems the more overlapping
you see. I could not now, for my life, pigeonhole my acquaintance
in this village of five hundred souls. "I have now been in Italy two
days," Goethe wrote, "and I think I know my Italians pretty well!"
When he had been there two years he knew better.

If ever there is a time for sententiousness it is when one is elderly,
leisured and comfortable; that is the time to set down one's thoughts
as they come, not inviting anybody to read them, but promising to
those who do, that they will find a commentary upon life as it passes,
either because it may be useful or because it may have been earned. I
hope I have neither prejudice nor afterthought; I know that I have,
as we say now, neither axe to grind nor log to roll. Politics! None.
I want people to be happy; and whether Mr. George make them so, or the
Trade Unions, whether Christ or Sir Conan Doyle, it's all one to me.
I have my pet nostrums, of course. I believe in Poverty, Love, and
England, and am convinced that only through the first will the other
two thrive. I want men to be gentlemen and women to be modest. I want
men to have work and women to have children. Any check on production,
Trade-Union, war, or something else, will get no good words from me.
As for war, after our late experience, I confess that I could be a Mr.
Dick with it, but we are not apt in the country to dwell overmuch on
war now it is over. We honour our beloved dead; those of us who have
returned unbattered go now about our work with cooler, more critical
eyes, but mostly with lips closed against our three or four years'
experience. Khaki has disappeared; the war is over; let us forget
it. If there is a people to be pitied, swarming and groping on this
tormented earth, we say, it is the German people; but that seems an
insufficient reason for hating them _in saecula saeculorum_. A German
is a human being, and very likely Mr. Bottomley is one too, and not a
big-head in a pantomime; such also may be Mrs. Partington's nephew and
the editor of the _Morning Post_. There does not seem m