top-dress--that's all. Does your father take any interest in this? He
could write something very nice."

"He takes interest in everything," said Nedda. "Please go on,
Mr.--Mr.--" She was terribly afraid he would suddenly remember that she
was too young and stop his nice, angry talk.

"Cuthcott. I'm an editor, but I was brought up on a farm, and know
something about it. You see, we English are grumblers, snobs to the
backbone, want to be something better than we are; and education
nowadays is all in the direction of despising what is quiet and humdrum.
We never were a stay-at-home lot, like the French. That's at the back of
this business--they may treat it as they like, Radicals or Tories, but
if they can't get a fundamental change of opinion into the national
mind as to what is a sane and profitable life; if they can't work a
revolution in the spirit of our education, they'll do no good. There'll
be lots of talk and tinkering, tariffs and tommy-rot, and, underneath,
the land-bred men dying, dying all the time. No, madam, industrialism
and vested interests have got us! Bar the most strenuous national
heroism, there's nothing for it now but the garden city!"

"Then if we WERE all heroic, 'the Land' could still be saved?"

Mr. Cuthcott smiled.

"Of course we might have a European war or something that would shake
everything up. But, short of that, when was a country ever consciously
and homogeneously heroic--except China with its opium? When did it ever
deliberately change the spirit of its education, the trend of its ideas;
when did it ever, of its own free will, lay its vested interests on the