During the commonwealth, Milton made a feeble attempt to disprove the king's claim to the composition of the book: after the restoration, Dr. Gauden, a clergyman of Bocking, in Essex, came forward and declared himself the real author.

3. NATIONS IN LIQUIDATION 4. BRAINTREE, BOCKING, AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD 5.

IV. BRAINTREE, BOCKING, AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD Will the war be followed by a period of great distress, social disorder and a revolution in Europe, or shall we pull through the crisis without violent disaster?

The south side belongs to the urban district of Braintree; the north to the rural district of Bocking.

He will find a Bocking water main supplying the houses on the north side and a Braintree water main supplying the south.

The total population of Bocking and Braintree is probably little more than thirteen thousand souls altogether, but for that there are two water supplies, two sets of schools, two administrations.

To the passing observer the rurality of the Bocking side is indistinguishable from the urbanity of the Braintree side; it is just a little muddier.

If you will present a Bocking rustic with a tin of the canned fruit that is popular with the Braintree townsfolk, you discover one of these differences.

But the Braintree grocers sell canned food with difficulty into Bocking.

Bocking, less fortunate than its neighbour, has no dustman apparently, and is left with the tin on its hands.

They have their separate cemeteries.... Now to any disinterested observer there lies about the Braintree-Bocking railway station one community.

The shops and inns on the Bocking side of the main street are indistinguishable from those on the Braintree side.

It is wasteful, unfair (because the Bocking piece is rather better off than Braintree and with fewer people, so that there is a difference in the rates), and for nine-tenths of the community it is more or less of a nuisance.

Because the muddle between the sides of the main road through Bocking and Braintree is not an isolated instance; it is a fair sample of the way things are done in Great Britain; it is an intimation of the way in which the great task of industrial resettlement that the nation must face may be attempted.

This Bocking-Braintree main road is, it happens, an old Stane Street, along which Roman legions marched to clean up the councils and clerks of the British tribal system two thousand years ago, and no doubt an historian could spin delightful consequences; this does not alter the fact that these quaint complications in English affairs mean in the aggregate enormous obstruction and waste of human energy.

Suppose the clerk of Braintree went to the clerk of Bocking and said: "Look here, one of us could do the work of both of us, as well or better.

" Suppose the people of Braintree and Bocking, not waiting for that lead, said: "But this is absurd!

I can quite imagine that Bocking has admirable reasons for refusing coalescence with Braintree, except upon terms that Braintree could not possibly consider.

Bocking and Braintree and Mr. John SmithMr.

John Smith, the ordinary comfortable man with a stake in the countryhave been thinking altogether too much of the claims and rights and expectations and economies of Bocking and Braintree and Mr. John Smith.

How is this tremendous job going to be done if every Bocking in the country is holding out for impossible terms from Braintree, and every Braintree holding out for impossible terms from Bocking, while the road out remains choked and confused between them; and if every John Smith with a claim is insisting upon his reasonable expectation of profits or dividends, his reasonable solatium and compensation for getting out of the way?

It is the spirit that makes Bocking forget that it is not Braintree and John Smith forget that he is John Smith, and both remember that they are England.

This Braintree-Bocking boundary which runs down the middle of the road is to be found all over the world.

You will find the Bocking-Braintree line too at a dozen points on a small scale map of Europe....

These Braintree-Bocking lines are the barbed-wire entanglements between us and the peace of the world.