Part 1

RUSTICUS

TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

For the Contents of this Series see the end of the Book.

RUSTICUS

THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRYSIDE

BY MARTIN S. BRIGGS

Rusticus exspectat dum defluat amnis.

Horace, Epist. I, i, 42

LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & Co., LTD. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

In the Heel of Italy. 1910.

Baroque Architecture. 1913.

Through Egypt in War-time. 1918.

Muhammadan Architecture in Egypt and Palestine. 1924.

A Short History of the Building Crafts. 1925.

The Architect in History. (in the Press)

Made and Printed in Great Britain by

THE BOWERING PRESS, PLYMOUTH.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. “SO THIS IS ENGLAND!” 7

II. BEFORE THE DELUGE 12

III. KING COAL (c. 1810-1910) 26

IV. THE AGE OF PETROL (c. 1910 onwards) 46

V. THE FUTURE 61

SOME ADDRESSES 95

“SO THIS IS ENGLAND!”

On every side a wail is rising over the irreparable damage that is being done to the rural England that we all claim to love. The change that has occurred is most evident to those who have not witnessed its steady progress, rapid as it has been. To realise what has happened, let us put ourselves in the place of an Englishman who is now returning home after a sojourn of twenty years in some remote Eastern outpost of our Empire. Imagine him as a sensitive observer like Doughty or Kinglake, a man who has learned to appreciate the savage beauty of the Arabian desert, the very antithesis of his own land. But now at last the sand has eaten into his soul, and he is longing to see the English countryside that he remembers so well. He thinks of small green fields, of little grey churches with rooks cawing among the elms, of running water, even of grey skies, in fact of everything that is most characteristically English. There is nothing in our poetry that better describes this England than Kipling’s “Sussex,” and Kipling knew all about the East.