St. John's Priory 
Poling, Near Arundel, England. 
July 26, 1921. 
Mrs. Francis King, 
Alma, Michigan. 
Dear Madam : 
Your request that I should give you some idea of the position 
in England of public remonstrance and action against the 
abominable attempts which are made to render the English coun- 
tryside, English country towns and villages hideous or distasteful 
by means of inappropriate public advertisements comes at a 
time and season when I am not very well, when I am exceedingly 
busy over the completion of two books, and when I am depressed 
— as are most of us — by an unprecedented drought. This has 
made our gardens lamentable, and our anxiety as to water supply 
and home food-products so acute that for once we turn an indif- 
ferent eye on the needless destruction of natural beauty or of 
historical appropriateness. Unhappily in this extremely old and 
interesting country, wherein man wandered when he had scarcely 
left the range of the brute, there are scarcely any politicians who 
have any regard for beauty, or if they have such regard, they 
lack the courage to stand up against the masses in the wholesale 
destruction of beautiful scenery, and picturesque and seemly 
toMns, which is going on. The craze of the day is for advertise- 
ment. Advertisements must be thrust on the eye wherever we 
go, and especially where charms of scenery or the spell of history 
allure us. 
I live near a very old English town, Arundel, which has had 
an English history going back with few interruptions to Roman 
times, and which was so endowed by nature with hills and cliffs; 
woods and thickets, downs and streams that it is actually proving 
hard work to make it ugly and unseemly. Yet the lower middle 
and the average middle classes are likely to succeed in their object 
of reducing Arundel to hideousness by means of advertisements. 
Tourists are attracted to this neighborhood by custom rather than 
by knowledge of its history and its vanished charms. The citizens 
of Arundel, its very Mayors meet the tourists with road adver- 
tisements of motor vehicles, motor repairs, lung tonics, specific 
remedies for stomachic disorders, recommendations of American 
pickled gherkins, or table sauces ; and the new tourist imagines 
it must have been always so and wondere why painters twenty 
years ago ilhistrated the scenery and what poets could have seen 
in West Sussex to arouse their lyric frenzies. On the do^^'ns we 
have the Gypsies, when there is no race meeting to claim their 
frowsy company. If they ever had any picturesqueness they have 
lost it. They are now-a-days the off-scourings of our towns; 
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