What a pleasure it will be—a minor pleasure, I admit, but life is complex and it is difficult to establish values—what a pleasure it will be when maps and statistics return!

To-day, in this delightful year of 1922, they are all at sixes and sevens. So is everything else, you may say, especially currency—let alone morals. But still, one regrets maps and statistics most because to lose them is to lose one's moorings. We are all adrift without them.

What fun it used to be before the war to discuss the various "Powers" (as they were called). There was a Power called "Germany," and there was another called "Austria," or sometimes "Austria-Hungary," and there was one called "Russia," and there was "the Anglo-Saxon Race," too, and all sorts of things.

When I was a very little boy there was an enormous green blob over the bottom right-hand corner of the map, marked "Turkey," and I remember a learned man telling me that a bit called "Rumania" did not really count as Turkey, and a bit called "Servia" was really quite separate: and they were marked round with a dotted line. But I thought this man an interfering hair-splitter. I was a human being, though so young, and I liked to stand squarely upon my two feet and to know exactly where I was. So I thought of a country called "Turkey," inhabited by people called "Turks," and I used to see, wandering all over their country, animals called "Turkeys," which, I had been told by some foolish older person, took their name from this district. The young are not yet broken-in to change.

So, on through my early and middle life there was a recognisable Europe. One knew the debatable points (at least, on the map), but there were frontiers. There were powerful centres also, and anomalies to season the dish.

Where is all that to-day?

Thank God, this island at least has a frontier. It is the inviolate sea. I remember a boy at school who used to read the passage "the violet sea," so as to make sense, and I applaud him still. "Surrounded by the violet sea," read this sturdy youth. We all knew what "violet" meant: it was a sort of blue. But what the devil was "inviolate"! Lucidity is the soul of style. Therefore, I say, I applaud that youth.

Anyhow, colour or no, brown, green, or grey, the sea sounds all round England. Those who live in this island know where it begins and where it ends, in spite of the bookish people who say that one frontier is the enemy's coastline. (Heaven have mercy upon them, they are living in the past. Some day I will show them an aeroplane!) North of the Pyrenees nobody on the Continent can say as much to-day: since the war! One country has a frontier expanding outwards, bulging, and another has ceased to be a country; and a third, whilst still a country, has but a theoretical frontier which feels like touchpaper, or like burnt rag; and yet another is a new country, sprung up out of the effect of the war, and with frontiers which are to the old strict frontiers what the chopped-up prose of the new poets is to Pope or Dryden.

I do wish the maps would come back, but I fear they will not come back in my time. I see that, in despair, the people who must sell maps or perish are taking to printing merely physical maps, maps of mountains and rivers and seas. They are returning to Pan and the original gods of this ironic globe. They are (virtually) saying: "Mankind has abandoned its job. Men are no longer political. We yield to you, spirits of the stream and of the hill, the throne we once possessed."

I do not say that the advertisers, printers, company promoters, touts, circularisers, boomsters, spell-binders, and all the rest of the happy throng who are producing the new atlases use these very words; but that is what they are at, all the same.

Only the other day a man showed me a superb map of Mexico and the United States (as we used to call them in our dear old-fashioned language) up to about the caÑon of the Colorado. I said to him: "It is very beautiful, and the contours stand out. The rivers are of a bold blue: the swamps are green: the mountains brown. But I do not see the division between the United States and Mexico." He said to me: "It has not yet been put in because of the League of Nations"—a funny reason....

Then there are statistics. Anything in the world can be proved by statistics, and it was half the occupation of a serious man with a bee in his bonnet (as most serious men have) to work statistics, to knead them with the fists, and to tread them with the feet, and to juggle them with the thumbs, and to smooth them down with the palm, and to pat them into shape with the fingers, and to square them off with a trowel, and to bake them very cunningly into a hard form. He, having done this, would prove to you anything on earth—I mean before the year 1914. He would prove to you that the French were going down and the Germans going up: that everybody was going to talk English in fifty years: that London (oh! joyful thought!) would stretch out beyond Dorking and Reigate, beyond Hertford and Marlow, within the life of a man: that the United States (I mean America) would easily grow to eat up Europe: that most of the African deserts would be filled with cads, and that the greatness of a nation depended not upon its religion, still less upon its morals, hardly at all upon its courage or intelligence, but wholly upon its hoicking out of coal.

I do wish those statistics would come back! We have had none of them for so many years! We cannot talk of the birth-rate of Egypt or Persia. We no longer know what is meant by export and import ... and with these two dread words another suggestion works its way into my mind.

The war has produced propaganda. Truth took to its bed in the spring of 1915 and died unregretted, with few attendants, about a year later. Everything since then has been propaganda.

It is an imperative duty to serve one's country, and one's country in danger of death had to be served by silence and by lies. But now the root has struck, and all this lying and all this silence has become a habit. So to-day, when you read this or that in a paper, you know very well that you are not reading any cold truth at all, but an advertisement. Time was, if a public document said: "The road from Pekaboo to Chakanugga is under repair after the third mile-stone," you believed it and went round by a side way. But to-day, when you read such things, you know that it means, not that the road is under repair, but that it is to the advantage of some man, corporation, policy or State to suggest that it is under repair.... If it is under repair, well and good ... but it is a pure chance. They use the truth when it suits them, but only because it suits them. Most of the time they lie.

And here, like a man discovering a diamond in blue clay, let me admit the great exception. Through all this welter of falsehood the Admiralty stands firm. I pick up my charts, I read my various "Pilots" (especially my beloved "English Channel Pilot I"), and the truth comes out, august, white-robed, with level brows, contemptuous of advocacy. The documents of this great Department please me like the Creed. Their level voice is the voice of doom. "Halnacker Mill open of Bognor Church Spire leads through the Swatchway." It is true that the sweeps have fallen from Halnacker Mill and you cannot see it as well from sea as you used to do. If you will allow me (without offence, I hope) to tell you the plain truth, not one man in fifty in one day out of ten has ever seen Halnacker Mill from outside the Owers. All he sees, even in fair weather, is a sort of blur, which he hopes to be Sussex, or Paradise. Anyhow, the document, the record, is there. If you can see Halnacker Mill, even with the sweeps gone down, and if you open it east of Bognor Church Spire, you will get through the Swatchway: if you don't you will strike the Owers, and I for one shall not care.

So it is with all these pronouncements of marble and of bronze.

"Note.—The mariner will do well to avoid the passage of the Looe Stream at the fall of night against an adverse tide, especially if the wind is freshening from the south-west." He will, by God! This is not a statement to frighten Germans or to pacify Jugo-Slavs. It is the thing itself. Stark Truth: Reality, the eldest-born Daughter of Heaven; that Goddess whom some call Aletheia from her lovely face, and others Ananke from her damnable muscles, the grip of whose hand when you ask her to lead you through this tangled world is extraordinarily firm, tactless and painful.

I then, who love statistics and maps, shall, for the next few months or years, confine myself to the publications of the Admiralty in the "Channel Pilot" I and II, in "The West Coast Pilot" and the rest. Their pictures of the British coast are the best I know. The information of the Admiralty is exact, and its motives (alone of the motives now governing our chaotic world) are pure.