GODALMING 287 



The common cry is that commercial advancement can- 

 not be barred by merely sentimental objections. After all, 

 in comparison with commerce, what are trifles like love 

 and loyalty, honour and honesty, religion and patriotism, but 

 sentimental ? Are they the less powerful agents in moving 

 the minds of men or forming the history of nations ? 

 There are a great many people who see no use in the 

 British Museum or the National Gallery, and yet they do 

 not venture to protest against having to pay for their 

 maintenance. These are not commercial institutions, but 

 even those who do not feel the want of them are yet 

 dimly conscious that they are desirable possessions for a 

 great nation. 



So it is that those who lately saved the Town Hall, 

 and also Eashing Bridge, deserve well of their country, and 

 have shown the truest patriotism as well as the truest 

 local wisdom. The older buildings, down to the very latest 

 that shows the continuity of architectural progression, are 

 a precious heritage, belonging in a way to the town and 

 county. To retain them untouched, and to preserve them 

 from decay or demolition, should be felt to be the duty of 

 every good townsman. 



I feel sure that in another hundred years this will be 

 known more widely and felt more strongly even than now. 

 As we now so keenly regret that want of just appreciation 

 of a hundred years ago that destroyed numbers of those 

 dwellings of Tudor and Stuart times, whose fewer remnants 

 are now so jealously preserved and so worthily prized ; and 

 as all educated people unite in condemning the acts of their 

 destroyers ; so let us beware, lest our great-grandchildren 

 may in like manner be able to say of us : ' What Goths those 

 ancestors of ours must have been ! ' 



