Rain Upon Godshill: A Further Chapter of Autobiography

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[front flyleaf:] A further chapter of autobiography: a companion volume to that brilliant success "Midnight on the Desert" [1937]. "Is London still the financial capital of the world? I hope not. I distrust this money-lending England represented by the City, and I should like to see it receive such a set-back that the other, the producing England, came to be given another chance. The City is much too near Westminster; they can hear each other talking. For the last twenty years we have been governed for the benefit of the City, and it does not follow that what sustains the City is the best sustenance for the nation. There are better ways of earning a living than drawing interest on loans. Production is healthier and more satisfying than usury. What this policy of favouring the money-lending Britain has created is chiefly these two sets of unemployed, with one large group of people bored and grumbling, and the other under-nourished and hopeless. And one set of unemployed has helped to prevent our making a plan for the salvation of the other set. Meanwhile, the foreigner tends to be envious of our unearned wealth and contemptuous of our grey poverty. We do not want to live in a country of such bitter extremes. It is not our idea of England at all. We do not want a land in which ruined industrial areas, where ghosts of good workmen go wandering about to pick up rubbish, alternate with moneylenders' bright gardens. The policy that has resulted in something like this has been tried long enough. It is time it was reversed, to produce a creative England in which the maximum and not the minimum of people are doing a little useful work." --pp251-252