PREFACE

t | 1HOSE fighting have a right to the answer to a question
I now forming in millions of minds. What is going to happen
JL after the War ? For we know what happened after the last,
In a wartime broadcast Mr. J. B. Priestley, contrasting a visit to a
deserted Margate with one taken a few years ago, asked himself
whether, had he a magician's power, he would bring back that
happier peacetime scene in place of the grisly present. And he
answered, No. For by making such a choice he would forego the
right to make a better future—a Margate and an England which
no man can at present even visualise.

The key to a nation's future is in her past. A nation that loses
it has no future. For men's deepest desires—the instrument by
which a continuing society moulds its destiny—spring from their
own inherited experience. We cannot recreate the past, but we
cannot escape it. It is in our blood and bone. To understand the
temperament of a people, a statesman has first to know its history.

This record of a hundred years of crowded social evolution has
been written at a turning point in England's existence. At the
time it opens an old society was dying largely through its inability
to adapt itself to revolutionary change. The new nation which
took its place never understood it The England of the rationalists
and the money-makers had no time to consider the England of
the "yeoman and the ale house OB the heath." It thus lost the
key to its own past and future. Its divided posterity has been
seddng it ever since.

The social conditions of that older England—Christian, rural,
half-democratic and half-authoritarian—were the outcome of
centuries of evolution. They combined diversity with great
cohesion and strength. Within their strong but narrow confines
the English had developed the capacity for compromise, ordered
freedom and toleration which is the core of modern democracy,
defeated the attempts of the Spanish and French Empires to
dominate the world by force and established, with the aid of sister
kingdoms, the British Empire in their stead. They left posterity,
the English village and countryside, the parliamentary system,