Roman Britain in 1914

"This book is in all probability the last of a series of writings, of which--disregarding certain earlier disconnected essays--my Anticipations was the beginning. Originally I in­essays--in­tended Anticipations to be my sole digression from my art or tended trade (or what you will) of an imaginative writer. I wrote that book in order to clear up the muddle in my own mind about innumerable social and political questions, questions I could not keep out of my work, which it distressed me to touch upon in a stupid haphazard way, and which no one, so far as I knew, had handled in a manner to satisfy my needs. But Anticipations did not achieve its end. I have a slow constru­Anticipations constru­ctive hesitating sort of mind, and when I emerged from that ctive undertaking I found I had still most of my questions to state and solve. In Mankind in the Making, therefore, I tried to re­and re­view the social organisation in a different way, to consider it view as an educational process instead of dealing with it as a thing with a future history, and if I made this second book even less satisfactory from a literary standpoint than the former (and this is my opinion), I blundered, I think, more edifying­(edifying­ly--at least from the point of view of my own instruction **