You remember the little French towns which the pestle and mortar of war had so ground into dust, red and white, that each separate brick went back at last, dust to dust, to mix with the earth from which it had come. The very clay of them has to be put into moulds and fired again. To some such remaking of bricks, some shaping and hardening anew of the most elementary, plainest units of rightness in action, we have to get back. Humdrum decencies, patiently practised through millions of undistinguished lives, were the myriad bricks out of which all the advanced architecture of conduct was built--the solemn temples of creeds, gorgeous palaces of romantic heroism, cloud-capped towers of patriotic exaltation. And now, just when there seems to be such a babble as never before about these grandiose structures, bricks have run short. Something simple, minute, and obscure, wholly good and not pulled up at all, something almost atomic--a grain of wheat, a thread of wool, a crystal of clean salt, figures best the kind of human excellence of which our world has now most need. We would seem to have plunged on too fast and too far, like boys who have taken to spouting six-syllabled words until they forget what they had learnt of the alphabet. The moral beauty of perfect contrition is preached to a beaten enemy by our Press while the vitals of England are rotting with unprecedented growths of venereal disease: an England of boundlessly advertised heroes and saints has ousted the England in which you would never, wherever you travelled, be given wrong change on a bus. The wise man saved his little city, "yet no man remembered that same poor man," and no one had better take to this way of saving England if what he wants is public distinction. It will be a career as undistinguished as that of one of the extra corpuscles formed in the blood to enable a lowland man to live on Himalayan heights. Our best friends for a long time to come will not be any of the standing cynosures of reporters' eyes; they will find a part of their satisfaction in being nobodies; assured of the truth of the saying that there is no limit to what a man can do so long as he does not care a straw who gets the credit for it. Working apart from the whole overblown world of war valuations, the scramble for honours earned and unearned, the plotting and jostling for front places on the stage and larger letters on the bill, the whole life that is commonly held up to admiration as great and enviable, they will live in a kind of retreat almost cloistral; plenty of work for the faculties, plenty of rest for the nerves, control for desire and atrophy for conceit. Hard?--yes, but England is worth it. IV