illiterate, foul-mouthed and ugly. Enormous chars-a-banc surge 
over the country roads and deposit by the wayside contingents of 
town-roughs, who forthwith proceed in a frenzied destruction of 
beauty to break down branches, and to bestrew the forest with 
waste paper. This is your curse, I have seen, as well as ours — 
and yet they say paper is dear! Our excursionist parties can 
destroy in an hour or so the mingled charms of wildflower and 
fern, green grass and graceful branches. They leave in place of 
the flora, masses of dirty paper. 
Sussex is remarkable among other things for having once 
possessed — some five hundred thousand years ago — a creature 
which was nearly Man but still a brute, Eoanthropos dawsoni. 
This type — alas! is returning, though not indigenous. Brutal 
men and women are being brought here from the towns by our 
new command of transport power in motor vehicles, and are 
trampling out our landscape beauty. England is being sub- 
merged under one great paper chase. ''Beauty" to these yelling 
men and women and noisy children means nothing; perhaps, 
some day they may leave the English countryside for the Con- 
tinent or the air or the open sea and we may make a limited 
recovery. 
You ask me about the Scapa Society of London. It did much 
good before the War overwhelmed educated public opinion. Its 
leading lights and enthusiastic workers have in course of time 
grown old, have died, or have learned discouragement in the utter 
indifference to natural, national scenic beauty shown by our 
ministers of State and parliamentary notabilities. These in their 
turn, perhaps, are frightened by the masses. And the masses, 
whatever nobility of nature they may have possessed or acquired 
— and their men and women were heroic in the War — seem as 
a rule to lack appreciation of history, but most of all any con- 
ception of natural beauty. Life for them is an unending paper- 
chase, as it is in the Middle States of yoiir great country. Our 
people are contented to live and die surrounded by dirty 
crumpled paper, orange peel, banana skins, broken bottles and 
frowsy rags. And because these things were lacking in the 
unspoilt country-side, our town dwellers bring them there in 
their char-a-banc excursions. In short, the blame chiefly lies 
on and with our National Education. Our schools of all types 
pursue the curricula of the middle ages and teach the people and 
the classes nothing of true history or of the rare beauty and 
marvellous endowment of our own country. Strange, is it not? 
For the first of Earth's races, the Anglo-American, to be so far 
behind the Hollander, the German, the Frenchman, the Italian or 
the Spaniard? The only check to my discouragement has been 
the enormous reform in seemliness, the new appreciation of 
scenic landscape-beauty I have witnessed in the eastern part of 
the United States. There may be the same encouraging signs 
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