[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Two articles by Sir
J. C. Stamp and John Galswoithy in the excellent Centenary number irritate me : " To clear away what Irving Fisher calls the money illusion is the first necessity of thinking to-day on social questions," says the one in concluding his contribution to an analysis of the " underlying causes of many of our social troubles." and the other also in
conclusion of an article on " England's Green Beauty," says : " For lack of a united and permanent policy coherently pursued, our agriculture declines steadily. It will be even so with our landscape, unless we unite and stand firm to save it.
English lovers of beauty in nature to-day are like the Guards at Waterloo : If their stand is broken England's green beauty will be destroyed beyond repair." I often travel south from Wakefield to London or from London to the West of England, and those vast green spaces annoy me, and I love the beauties of nature ardently. It is the fact of the teeming populations in areas like the West Riding and London, and the vast areas of pleasant places so sparsely populated, kept green by our Waterloo Guards "—that seems like sacrilege. I lay out roads lnd cut down trees and do all the fearful things our critics lament in the hope of bringing green fields into better and more profitable cultivation, turn bracken and moor that has been undisturbed by the plough since Saxon days into sites for homes.—I am Sir, &c.,
J. CRABTREE,
West Riddlesden Hall, near Keighley.
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