CHAPTER II 

 NATURE-RESERVES 



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 super- 

 stitious reverence or let alone because there was room 

 for them and for everything else in the spacious country- 

 side — 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 for- 

 eigners 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 



