5

When I think of Bromstead nowadays I find it inseparably bound up

with the disorders of my father's gardening, and the odd patchings

and paintings that disfigured his houses. It was all of a piece

with that.

Let me try and give something of the quality of Bromstead and

something of its history. It is the quality and history of a

thousand places round and about London, and round and about the

other great centres of population in the world. Indeed it is in a

measure the quality of the whole of this modern world from which we

who have the statesman's passion struggle to evolve, and dream still

of evolving order.

First, then, you must think of Bromstead a hundred and fifty years

ago, as a narrow irregular little street of thatched houses strung

out on the London and Dover Road, a little mellow sample unit of a

social order that had a kind of completeness, at its level, of its

own. At that time its population numbered a little under two

thousand people, mostly engaged in agricultural work or in trades

serving agriculture. There was a blacksmith, a saddler, a chemist,

a doctor, a barber, a linen-draper (who brewed his own beer); a

veterinary surgeon, a hardware shop, and two capacious inns. Round

and about it were a number of pleasant gentlemen's seats, whose

owners went frequently to London town in their coaches along the

very tolerable high-road. The church was big enough to hold the

whole population, were people minded to go to church, and indeed a

large proportion did go, and all who married were married in it, and

everybody, to begin with, was christened at its font and buried at

last in its yew-shaded graveyard. Everybody knew everybody in the

place. It was, in fact, a definite place and a real human community

in those days. There was a pleasant old market-house in the middle

of the town with a weekly market, and an annual fair at which much

cheerful merry making and homely intoxication occurred; there was a

pack of hounds which hunted within five miles of London Bridge, and

the local gentry would occasionally enliven the place with valiant

cricket matches for a hundred guineas a side, to the vast excitement

of the entire population. It was very much the same sort of place

that it had been for three or four centuries. A Bromstead Rip van

Winkle from 1550 returning in 1750 would have found most of the old

houses still as he had known them, the same trades a little improved

and differentiated one from the other, the same roads rather more

carefully tended, the Inns not very much altered, the ancient

familiar market-house. The occasional wheeled traffic would have

struck him as the most remarkable difference, next perhaps to the

swaggering painted stone monuments instead of brasses and the

protestant severity of the communion-table in the parish church,-

both from the material point of view very little things. A Rip van

Winkle from 1350, again, would have noticed scarcely greater

changes; fewer clergy, more people, and particularly more people of

the middling sort; the glass in the windows of many of the houses,

the stylish chimneys springing up everywhere would have impressed

him, and suchlike details. The place would have had the same

boundaries, the same broad essential features, would have been still

itself in the way that a man is still himself after he has "filled

out" a little and grown a longer beard and changed his clothes.

But after 1750 something got hold of the world, something that was

destined to alter the scale of every human affair.

That something was machinery and a vague energetic disposition to

improve material things. In another part of England ingenious

people were beginning to use coal in smelting iron, and were

producing metal in abundance and metal castings in sizes that had

hitherto been unattainable. Without warning or preparation,

increment involving countless possibilities of further increment was

coming to the strength of horses and men. "Power," all

unsuspected, was flowing like a drug into the veins of the social

body.

Nobody seems to have perceived this coming of power, and nobody had

calculated its probable consequences. Suddenly, almost

inadvertently, people found themselves doing things that would have

amazed their ancestors. They began to construct wheeled vehicles

much more easily and cheaply than they had ever done before, to make

up roads and move things about that had formerly been esteemed too

heavy for locomotion, to join woodwork with iron nails instead of

wooden pegs, to achieve all sorts of mechanical possibilities, to

trade more freely and manufacture on a larger scale, to send goods

abroad in a wholesale and systematic way, to bring back commodities

from overseas, not simply spices and fine commodities, but goods in

bulk. The new influence spread to agriculture, iron appliances

replaced wooden, breeding of stock became systematic, paper-making

and printing increased and cheapened. Roofs of slate and tile

appeared amidst and presently prevailed over the original Bromstead

thatch, the huge space of Common to the south was extensively

enclosed, and what had been an ill-defined horse-track to Dover,

only passable by adventurous coaches in dry weather, became the

Dover Road, and was presently the route first of one and then of

several daily coaches. The High Street was discovered to be too

tortuous for these awakening energies, and a new road cut off its

worst contortions. Residential villas appeared occupied by retired

tradesmen and widows, who esteemed the place healthy, and by others

of a strange new unoccupied class of people who had money invested

in joint-stock enterprises. First one and then several boys'

boarding-schools came, drawing their pupils from London,-my

grandfather's was one of these. London, twelve miles to the north-

west, was making itself felt more and more.

But this was only the beginning of the growth period, the first