ONE of the new features of modern life--the result of the enormous development of the newspaper press and the vast increase in numbers of those who read and think in common--is the development of a sensitive "self-consciousness" of the community, a more or less successful effort to know its own history, to value the records of the past, and to question its own hitherto unconscious, unreflecting attitude in mechanically and as it were blindly destroying everything which gets in the way of that industrial and commercial activity which is regarded, erroneously, as identical with "progress." Beautiful old houses and strange buildings--priceless records of the ways and thought of our early ancestors---which at one time were either guarded by superstitious reverence or let alone because there was room for them and for everything else in the spacious countryside---have been thoughtlessly pulled down as population and grasping enterprise increased. The really graceful old houses of London and other towns, lovingly produced by former men who were true artists, have been broken up and their panelling and chimney-pieces sold to foreigners in order to make way for more commodious buildings, hideous in their ignorant decoration, or brutally "run up," gaunt, bare, and mis-shapen. The stones of Avebury, of Stonehenge, and of many another temple have been knocked to pieces by emancipated country-folk--no longer restrained either by superstition or by reverence--to mend roads and to make enclosures.