CORRESPONDING SOCIETIES 445 



* a place of natural beauty.' The existence of the second condition is men- 

 tioned for two reasons : one of these will appeal to the delegates of all local 

 societies, since all can appreciate that while there may be room for difference 

 of opinion as to the aesthetic value of a particular property, there can be no 

 doubt as to the cost of its maintenance. The other reason may appeal to 

 delegates of local societies in Yorkshire ; they, at least, are aware that their 

 own county is, and has long been, one of the English counties that has been 

 most backward in its support of the National Trust. 



The more especial appeal of the Organising Committee that local societies 

 should assist in conserving the wild life of the countryside, raises questions 

 more difficult to resolve than those connected with the safeguarding of local 

 amenities. If a property acquired to safeguard a local amenity be handed 

 over to the National Trust, the Trust, through a managing committee, will 

 endeavour to conserve the wild life in the property : if a local society be 

 compelled to assume ownership, we may anticipate that it will endeavour to 

 do what the Trust would otherwise have done. But absolute protection of 

 wild life in properties acquired to safeguard amenities is not easily provided : 

 properties acquired to safeguard amenities must remain accessible to the 

 public they benefit. If, however, the funds required for the maintenance, 

 as apart from the acquisition, of such properties be adequate, indirect pro- 

 tection of this wild life can in time be made reasonably effective, especially 

 if the local area is so fortunate as to possess a local society on good terms 

 with its local authorities : the society will know what should be done, the 

 public authorities will be in a position to enforce the necessary regulations. 



Delegates may think, and indeed may hope, that local societies can count 

 upon the help of their local press in their efforts to safeguard the amenities 

 of their own areas. There is some reason for such hope. The press tries 

 to save us the trouble of forming opinions of our own regarding public 

 affairs and does much to protect our personal liberties against every en- 

 croachment save those of D.O.R.A. Even in its gossip columns, which 

 we have high legal authority for hoping to see discontinued, we were 

 surprised to read at Easter praise given, by a writer who has visited the 

 South Coast, to the National Trust and the Council for the Preservation of 

 Rural England, for their support of the local society at Lynton which is 

 endeavouring to preserve Watersmeet from the speculative builder and thus 

 arrest ' the rapid transformation of rural England into a vast chequer- 

 board of bungalow towns, power-stations and petrol-dumps, the blight that 

 has already overtaken the Sussex downs,' and to prevent the further dis- 

 figurement ' of that incomparable rural England whose passing we shall 

 some day mourn too late.' Such a paragraph may well encourage local 

 societies to establish a sympathetic understanding with their local press as 

 well as with their local authorities, and to lose no time in doing so lest the 

 influence of local editors be lent in default to the legislators whose sjTn- 

 pathies local societies must welcome, but whose understanding of the 

 problem in hand is such as to lead them to imagine that rural amenities 

 can be safeguarded by means of a town-planning bill. 



But whatever sympathy the press may express with efforts to safeguard 

 amenities, it is not to be counted upon yet to lend its aid to those anxious 

 to conserve wild life. A writer professing to be the individual who had been 

 on the Sussex Downs at Easter, at Whitsun visited the Chilterns. There the 

 sight of a local policeman preventing the picking of the bluebells of a private 

 citizen led him to reflect that ' an English holiday is not without its humorous 

 occasions,' and to remark some weeks later that, on hearing a ' broadcaster 

 solemnly denounce the people who pull up wild flowers by the roots as a 

 public nuisance that might become a public menace,' he ' could not help 



