There is a considerable dread of Communist activities in America. That is very largely due to an uneasy conscience, aware of a great mass of unassimilated immigrant labour very unfairly treated and very inadequately educated. There may be some grounds for such apprehensions; I will confess I do not think the present schools and colleges of America good enough and strong enough for the constructive work they ought to do. There may be a future for Communism there, and there will probably be a big movement towards Communism in the industrial centres of India and China and Japan. But in Europe I think that the Communist drive has passed its maximum and that the popular mind is moving onward to a more constructive and hopeful type of Socialism. Just as art in a phase of extreme sterility escaped by going back behind Raphael and starting afresh from the Pre-Raphaelite phase, so I think Socialism will soon be getting behind the unfortunate misdirection of Marx and Engels to become once more Utopian and fruitful. L THE LITTLE HOUSE: AS IT WAS, IS NOW, AND APPARENTLY EVER WILL BE 16.8.24 What a very odd spectacle the British Parliament face to face with the housing problem is! On the strength of that issue alone I should imagine that any really civilised judgment would condemn the poor old institution at once and set about a revolutionary search for a better constructed instrument of government. There is a shortage of housing accommodation in Great Britain; the picturesque, creeper-clad country cottage is too often a cramped, decivilising, insanitary fraud, and most of the industrial population lives in slums worse than the corresponding slums in America and little better than those on the Continent of Europe. You cannot get a house or flat in which a civilised family can live for much less than a hundred pounds a year rent, and most of those available at that price are stereotyped and dull-looking, and sometimes detestably ugly. Below that level comes a descending series of inconvenient, unsound, and unpleasant lodgments for the mass of the population. The Labour Ministry of Health has been making large encouraging gestures of help, it has projected big and complicated bargains with the building trades and the building trades unions that may--if all goes well--provide at an immense cost on a quasi-charity basis, at the public expense, a sufficiency of houses for the poorer sort of people of fifty years hence, according to the ideas of comfort and decency prevailing fifty years ago.