The
proper shops for Bladesover custom were still to be found in Regent
Street and Bond Street in my early London days in those days they
had been but lightly touched by the American's profaning hand--and in
Piccadilly. I found the doctor's house of the country village or country
town up and down Harley Street, multiplied but not otherwise different,
and the family solicitor (by the hundred) further eastward in the
abandoned houses of a previous generation of gentlepeople, and down in
Westminster, behind Palladian fronts, the public offices sheltered
in large Bladesoverish rooms and looked out on St. James's Park. The
Parliament Houses of lords and gentlemen, the parliament house that was
horrified when merchants and brewers came thrusting into it a hundred
years ago, stood out upon its terrace gathering the whole system
together into a head.
And the more I have paralleled these things with my Bladesover-Eastry
model, the more evident it has become to me that the balance is not the
same, and the more evident is the presence of great new forces, blind
forces of invasion, of growth.
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