440 CONFERENCE OF DELEGATES 



' Song of Corydon ' supplies such clear evidence, gave place to a mutual 

 understanding beneficial to both and advantageous to the commonwealth 

 as a whole. Without the food and the raw material that rural economy was 

 able to place at the disposal of manufacture, the Industrial Revolution might 

 have been arrested. But for this demand on rural economy, English highways 

 might not have received the macadamised surface which enabled those on 

 whose aid industrial enterprise and rural economy alike depended for the 

 distribution of food, raw material and finished goods, to substitute wheeled 

 vehicles for more archaic means of transport. 



But this was not the only advantage, nor, from the standpoint of local 

 societies, was it the most outstanding benefit that England owed to the 

 establishment of a rational understanding between rural and urban interests. 

 Compliance with the legislative injunction to make economic use of manorial 

 wastes caused rural economy to give attention to afforestation as well as to 

 agriculture. Lines and belts of trees converted exposed highways into shady 

 avenues and supplied shelter for fields in which crops were grown and herds 

 were tended. Open spaces, neglected since their exploitation and spoliation 

 by an earlier generation, and hitherto deemed unsuitable either for grazing 

 or for tillage, were changed into woodland glades. To these activities many 

 areas in England owe the amenities they now possess and the shelter for the 

 flora and the fauna of the countryside they now provide. 



If, twenty years ago, it could be said with some justice that, thanks to her 

 rural economy, England could boast amenities which went far to compensate 

 for the outrages inflicted on the countryside by her industrial system, we 

 can hardly say this now. We have seen the effects of the substitution, in 

 the utilisation of our timber supplies during the war, of the methods of 

 commercial exploitation for those of forest management. We know that 

 much of this damage is reparable, and that a sympathetic Forestry Com- 

 mission, itself unsympathetically regarded, has the requisite work in hand. 

 But we also know that the damage done during a season of exploitation often 

 takes a century to repair, and there are many local areas where few of us 

 may hope to see again the countryside we once knew. Nor is this all. We 

 have seen, since the war ceased, and still see every day, damage done to our 

 amenities that might easily have been avoided but that never can be repaired. 

 This damage is not wholly due to the unrestrained activity of speculative 

 builders. We observe public authorities taking an active part in the destruc- 

 tion of groves and avenues while engaged in modifying highways to meet the 

 requirements of modern traffic, yet remaining powerless to prevent the 

 conversion of their ' improved routes ' into ' ribbon communities.' 



This particular result, as most of us know, is one of the indications that 

 urban interests no longer sympathise with or desire to understand rural 

 requirements. We have been familiar, since the days of the statesman who 

 told us, truly enough, that ' we are all socialists now,' with the pious hope of 

 ardent urban reformers that the day may come when the highway from York 

 to London shall have become one long, unbroken street. This urbane 

 policy has already substituted for countless once beautiful examples of rural 

 scenery the bungaloid tentacles of our larger towns. The author of The 

 Path to Rome has explained more clearly than its advocates themselves the 

 intellectual attitude which inspires the policy : ' Whenever you see a lot of 

 red roofs nestling, as the phrase goes, in the woods of a hillside in south 

 England, remember that all that is savagery ; but when you see a hundred 

 white-washed houses in a row along a dead straight road, lift up your hearts, 

 for you are in civilisation again.' 



Our hearts need not be unduly cast down because, for the past half-century, 

 urban and rural aims and interests have been out of tune once more : we 



