CHANGE IN THE VILLAGE

BY

GEORGE BOURNE

NEW YORKGEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY1912

_Printed in Great Britain by Billing & Sons, Ltd. , Guildford, England_

TO

MY SISTERS

CONTENTS

I PAGE I. THE VILLAGE 3

II

THE PRESENT TIME

 II. SELF-RELIANCE 21 III. MAN AND WIFE 38 IV. MANIFOLD TROUBLES 50 V. DRINK 65 VI. WAYS AND MEANS 79 VII. GOOD TEMPER 97

III

THE ALTERED CIRCUMSTANCES

 VIII. THE PEASANT SYSTEM 115 IX. THE NEW THRIFT 127 X. COMPETITION 143 XI. HUMILIATION 151 XII. THE HUMILIATED 167 XIII. NOTICE TO QUIT 180

IV

THE RESULTING NEEDS

 XIV. THE INITIAL DEFECT 193 XV. THE OPPORTUNITY 200 XVI. THE OBSTACLES 217 XVII. THE WOMEN'S NEED 229XVIII. THE WANT OF BOOK-LEARNING 244 XIX. EMOTIONAL STARVATION 260 XX. THE CHILDREN'S NEED 272

V

 XXI. THE FORWARD MOVEMENT 289

I

THE VILLAGE

I

THE VILLAGE

If one were to be very strict, I suppose it would be wrong to give thename of "village" to the parish dealt with in these chapters, becauseyour true village should have a sort of corporate history of its own, and this one can boast nothing of the kind. It clusters round no centralgreen; no squire ever lived in it; until some thirty years ago it waswithout a resident parson; its church is not half a century old. Nor arethere here, in the shape of patriarchal fields, or shady lanes, orvenerable homesteads, any of those features that testify to theimmemorial antiquity of real villages as the homes of men; and this fora very simple reason. In the days when real villages were growing, ourvalley could not have supported a quite self-contained community: itwas, in fact, nothing but a part of the wide rolling heath-country--the"common, " or "waste, " belonging to the town which lies northwards, in amore fertile valley of its own. Here, there was no fertility. Deep downin the hollow a stream, which runs dry every summer, had prepared astrip of soil just worth reclaiming as coarse meadow or tillage; but thestrip was narrow--a man might throw a stone across it at somepoints--and on either side the heath and gorse and fern held their ownon the dry sand. Such a place afforded no room for an English village ofthe true manorial kind; and I surmise that it lay all but uninhabiteduntil perhaps the middle of the eighteenth century, by which time a few"squatters" from neighbouring parishes had probably settled here, tomake what living they might beside the stream-bed. At no time, therefore, did the people form a group of genuinely agriculturalrustics. Up to a period within living memory, they were an almostindependent folk, leading a sort of "crofter, " or (as I have preferredto call it) a "peasant" life; while to-day the majority of the men, nolonger independent, go out to work as railway navvies, builders'labourers, drivers of vans and carts in the town; or are more casuallyemployed at digging gravel, or road-mending, or harvesting andhay-making, or attending people's gardens, or laying sewers, or in factat any job they can find. At a low estimate nine out of every ten ofthem get their living outside the parish boundaries; and this fact byitself would rob the place of its title to be thought a village, in thestrict sense. 

In appearance, too, it is abnormal. As you look down upon the valleyfrom its high sides, hardly anywhere are there to be seen threecottages in a row, but all about the steep slopes the little meandwelling-places are scattered in disorder. So it extends east and westfor perhaps a mile and a half--a surprisingly populous hollow now, wanting in restfulness to the eyes and much disfigured by shabby detail, as it winds away into homelier and softer country at either end. Thehigh-road out of the town, stretching away for Hindhead and the SouthCoast, comes slanting down athwart the valley, cutting it into "Upper"and "Lower" halves or ends; and just in the bottom, where there is abridge over the stream, the appearances might deceive a stranger intothinking that he had come to the nucleus of an old village, since adilapidated farmstead and a number of cottages line the sides of theroad at that point. The appearances, however, are deceptive. I doubt ifthe cottages are more than a century old; and even if any of them have agreater antiquity, still it is not as the last relics of an earliervillage that they are to be regarded. On the contrary, they indicate thebeginnings of the present village. Before them, their place wasunoccupied, and they do but commemorate the first of that series ofchanges by which the valley has been turned from a desolate wrinkle inthe heaths into the anomalous suburb it has become to-day. 

Of the period and manner of that first change I have already given ahint, attributing it indefinitely to a slow immigration of squatterssomewhere in the eighteenth century. Neither the manner of it, however, nor the period is material here. Let it suffice that, a hundred yearsago or so, the valley had become inhabited by people living in the"peasant" way presently to be described more fully. The subject of thisbook begins with the next change, which by and by overtook these samepeople, and dates from the enclosure of the common, no longer ago than1861. The enclosure was effected in the usual fashion: a few adjacentlandowners obtained the lion's share, while the cottagers came in forsmall allotments. These allotments, of little use to their owners, andin many cases soon sold for a few pounds apiece, became the sites of thefirst few cottages for a newer population, who slowly drifted in andsettled down, as far as might be, to the habits and outlook of theirpredecessors. This second period continued until about 1900. And now, during the last ten years, a yet greater change has been going on. Thevalley has been "discovered" as a "residential centre. " A water-companygave the signal for development. No sooner was a good water-supplyavailable than speculating architects and builders began to buy upvacant plots of land, or even cottages--it mattered little which--andwhat never was strictly speaking a village is at last ceasing even tothink itself one. The population of some five hundred twenty years agohas increased to over two thousand; the final shabby patches of the oldheath are disappearing; on all hands glimpses of new building and rawnew roads defy you to persuade yourself that you are in a country place. In fact, the place is a suburb of the town in the next valley, and theonce quiet high-road is noisy with the motor-cars of the richerresidents and all the town traffic that waits upon the less wealthy. 

But although in the exactest sense the parish was never a village, itsinhabitants, as lately as twenty years ago (when I came to live here)had after all a great many of the old English country characteristics. Dependent on the town for their living the most of them may have been bythat time; yet they had derived their outlook and their habits from theearlier half-squatting, half-yeoman people; so that I found myselfamongst neighbours rustic enough to justify me in speaking of them asvillagers. I have come across their like elsewhere, and I am notdeceived. They had the country touch. They were a survival of theEngland that is dying out now; and I grieve that I did not realize itsooner. As it was, some years had passed by, and the movement by which Ifind myself living to-day in a "residential centre" was already faintlystirring before I began to discern properly that the earliercircumstances would repay closer attention. 

They were not all agreeable circumstances; some of them, indeed, were somuch the reverse of agreeable that I hardly see now how I could everhave found them even tolerable. The want of proper sanitation, forinstance; the ever-recurring scarcity of water; the plentiful signs ofsqualid and disordered living--how unpleasant they all must have been!On the other hand, some of the circumstances were so acceptable that, torecover them, I could at times almost be willing to go back and endurethe others. It were worth something to renew the old lost sense ofquiet; worth something to be on such genial terms with one's neighbours;worth very much to become acquainted again at first hand with thecustoms and modes of thought that prevailed in those days. Here at mydoor people were living, in many respects, by primitive codes which havenow all but disappeared from England, and things must have beenfrequently happening such as, henceforth, will necessitate journeys intoother countries if one would see them. 

I remember yet how subtly the intimations of a primitive mode of livingused to reach me before I had learnt to appreciate their meaning. Unawares an impression of antiquity would come stealing over the senses, on a November evening, say, when the blue wood-smoke mounted from acottage chimney and went drifting slowly down the valley in levellayers; or on still summer afternoons, when there came up from thehollow the sounds of hay-making--the scythe shearing through the grass, the clatter of the whetstone, the occasional country voices. Thedialect, and the odd ideas expressed in it, worked their elusive magicover and over again. To hear a man commend the weather, rolling out his"Nice moarnin'" with the fat Surrey "R, " or to be wished "Good-day, sir, " in the high twanging voice of some cottage-woman or other, was tobe reminded in one's senses, without thinking about it at all, that onewas amongst people not of the town, and hardly of one's own era. Thequeer things, too, which one happened to hear of, the simple ideas whichseemed so much at home in the valley, though they would have been somuch to be deprecated in the town, all contributed to produce the sameold-world impression. Where the moon's changes were discussed sosolemnly, and people numbered the "mistis in March" in expectation ofcorresponding "frostis in May"; where, if a pig fell sick, publicopinion counselled killing it betimes, lest it should die and beconsidered unfit for food; where the most time-honoured saying wascounted the best wit, so that you raised a friendly smile by murmuring"Good for young ducks" when it rained; where the names of famous sortsof potatoes--red-nosed kidneys, _magnum bonums_, and so on--were betterknown than the names of politicians or of newspapers; where spades andreap-hooks of well-proved quality were treasured as friends by theirowners and coveted by other connoisseurs--it was impossible that oneshould not be frequently visited by the feeling of something veryold-fashioned in the human life surrounding one. 

More pointed in their suggestion of a rustic tradition were the variouscustoms and pursuits proper to given seasons. The customs, it is true, were preserved only by the children; but they had their acceptableeffect. It might have been foolish and out-of-date, yet it wasundeniably pleasant to know on May Day that the youngsters were makingholiday from school, and to have them come to the door with theirmorning faces, bringing their buttercup garlands and droning out theappropriate folk ditty. At Christmastime, too, it was pleasant when theycame singing carols after dark. This, indeed, they still do; but eitherI am harder to please or the performance has actually degenerated, for Ican no longer discover in it the simple childish spirit that made itgratifying years ago. 

Meanwhile, quite apart from such celebrations, the times and seasonsobserved by the people in following their work gave a flavour of folkmanners which dignified the life of the parish, by associating it withthe doings of the countryside for many generations. In August, thoughone did not see, one heard about, the gangs of men trudging off at nightfor the Sussex harvest. In September the days went very silently in thevalley, because the cottages were shut up and the people were all awayat the hop-picking; and then, in the gathering dusk, one heard the buzzand rumour of manifold homecomings--tired children squalling, womentalking and perhaps scolding, as the little chattering groups came nearand passed out of earshot to their several cottages; while, down thehollows, hovering in the crisp night air, drifted a most appetizingsmell of herrings being fried for a late meal. Earlier in the year therewas hay-making in the valley itself. All the warm night was sometimesfragrant with the scent of the cut grass; and about this season, too, the pungent odour of shallots lying out in the gardens to ripen offwould come in soft whiffs across the hedges. Always, at all times, thepeople were glad to gossip about their gardens, bringing vividly intoone's thoughts the homely importance of the month, nay, the very week, that was passing. Now, around Good Friday, the talk would be ofpotato-planting; and again, in proper order, one heard of peas andrunner-beans, and so through the summer fruits and plants, to theripening of plums and apples, and the lifting of potatoes and carrotsand parsnips. 

In all these ways the parish, if not a true village, seemed quite acountry place twenty years ago, and its people were country people. Yetthere was another side to the picture. The charm of it was a generalizedone--I think an impersonal one; for with the thought of individualpersons who might illustrate it there comes too often into my memory atouch of sordidness, if not in one connection then in another; so thatI suspect myself, not for the first time, of sentimentality. Was thesocial atmosphere after all anything but a creation of my own dreams?Was the village life really idyllic?

Not for a moment can I pretend that it was. Patience and industrydignified it; a certain rough jollity, a large amount of good temper andnatural kindness, kept it from being foul; but of the namby-pamby orsoft-headed sentiment which many writers have persuaded us to attributeto old-English cottage life I think I have not in twenty years met witha single trace. In fact, there are no people so likely to make ridiculeof that sort of thing as my labouring-class neighbours have always been. They do not, like the middle classes, enjoy it. It is a commodity forwhich they have no use, as may appear in the following pages. 

To say this, however, is to say too little. I do not mean that theprevailing temper in the village was sordid, bitter, cruel, like that, say, of the Norman peasantry in De Maupassant's short stories. In by farthe greater majority the people have usually seemed to me at the worst alittle suspicious, a little callous, a little undemonstrative, and atthe best generous and happy-go-lucky to a fault. Nevertheless, tales asrepulsive as any that the French writer has told of his country-peoplecould have been collected here by anyone with a taste for that sort ofthing. Circumstantial narratives have reached me of savage, or, say, brutish, doings: of sons ill-treating their mothers, and husbands theirwives of fights, and cruelties, and sometimes--not often--of infamousvice. The likelihood of these tales, which there was no reason to doubt, was strengthened by what I saw and heard for myself. Drunkennesscorrupted and disgraced the village life, so that good men went wrongand their families suffered miserably. I have helped more than onedrunkard home at night, and seen a wretched woman or a frightened childcome to the door to receive him. Even in the seclusion of my own gardenI could not escape the evidences of mischief going on. For sounds echoup and down the valley as clearly as across the water of a lake; andsometimes a quiet evening would grow suddenly horrid with distractednoises of family quarrel in some distant cottage, when women shrilledand clamoured and men cursed, and all the dogs in the parish fella-barking furiously. Even in bed one could not be secure. Once or twicesome wild cry in the night--a woman's scream, a man's volley ofoaths--has drawn me hurrying to my window in dread that outrage wasafoot; and often the sounds of obscene singing from the road, where menwere blundering homewards late from the public-houses in the town, havestartled me out of my first sleep. Then, besides the distresses broughtupon the people by their own folly, there were others thrust upon themby their economic condition. Of poverty, with its attendant sicknessesand neglects, there has never been any end to the tales, while thedesolations due to accidents in the day's work, on the railway, or withhorses, or upon scaffoldings of buildings, or in collapsinggravel-quarries, have become almost a commonplace. In short, there is noroom for sentimentality about the village life. Could its annals bewritten they would make no idyll; they would be too much stained bytragedy and vice and misery. 

Yet the knowledge of all this--and it was not possible to live here longwithout such knowledge--left the other impressions I have spoken ofquite unimpaired. Disorders were the exception, after all. As a generalrule the village character was genial, steadfast, self-respecting; onecould not but recognize in it a great fund of strength, a greatstability; nor could one help feeling that its main features--thelimitations and the grimness, as well as the surprising virtues--weresomehow closely related to that pleasant order of things suggested bythe hay-making sounds, by the smell of the wood-smoke, by the children'sMay-day garlands. And, in fact, the relationship was essential. Thetemper and manners of the older people turned out to have been actuallymoulded by conditions of a true village kind, so that the samefolk-quality that sounded in the little garland song reappeared moresternly in my neighbours' attitude towards their fate. Into this valley, it is true, much had never come that had flourished and been forgottenin English villages elsewhere. At no time had there been any of themore graceful folk arts here; at no time any comely social life, such asone reads of in Goldsmith's _Deserted Village_ or Gray's _Elegy_; but, as I gradually learnt, the impoverished labouring people I talked to hadbeen, in many cases, born in the more prosperous conditions of aself-supporting peasantry. 

Bit by bit the truth come home to me, in the course of unconcernedgossip, when my informants had no idea of the significance of thosestray scraps of information which they let fall. I was not alive to itmyself for a long time. But when I had heard of the village cows, whichused to be turned out to graze on the heaths, and had been told howfir-timber fit for cottage roof-joists could be cut on the common, aswell as heath good enough for thatching and turf excellent for firing;and when to this was added the talk of bread-ovens at half the oldcottages, and of little corn-crops in the gardens, and of brewing andwine-making and bee-keeping; I understood at last that my elderlyneighbours had seen with their own eyes what I should never see--namely, the old rustic economy of the English peasantry. In that light all sortsof things showed a new meaning. I looked with rather changed sentiments, for example, upon the noisome pigsties--for were they not a survival ofa venerable thrift? I viewed the old tools--hoes and spades and scythesand fag-hooks--with quickened interest; and I speculated with moreintelligence upon those aged people of the parish whose curious habitswere described to me with so much respect. But of all the details thatnow gained significance, most to be noted were the hints of thecomparative prosperity of that earlier time. For now some old woman, half starving on her parish pay, would indicate this or that littlecottage, and remark that her grandfather had built it for her mother togo into when she married. Or now, a decrepit man would explain that insuch and such a puzzling nook in the hillside had once stood hisfather's cow-stall. Here, at the edge of the arable strip, a buildingdivided into two poor cottages proved to have been originally somebody'slittle hop-kiln; there, on a warm slope given over to thepleasure-garden of some "resident" like myself, a former villager usedto grow enough wheat to keep him in flour half the winter; and thereagain, down a narrow by-way gone ruinous from long neglect, MasterSo-and-so, whose children to-day go in fear of the workhouse, was wontto drive his little waggon and pair of horses. 

Particulars like these, pointing to a lost state of well-being, accounted very well for the attraction which, in spite of individualfaults, I had felt towards the village folk in general. The people stoodfor something more than merely themselves. In their odd ways and talkand character I was affected, albeit unawares, by a robust tradition ofthe English countryside, surviving here when the circumstances whichwould have explained it had already largely disappeared. After too manyyears of undiscernment that truth was apparent to me. And even so, itwas but a gradual enlightenment; even now it is unlikely that Iappreciate the facts in their deepest significance. For the "robust"tradition, as I have just called it, was something more than simplyrobust. It was older, by far, than this anomalous village. Imported intothe valley--if my surmise is correct--by squatters two centuries ago, itwas already old even then; it already had centuries of experience behindit; and though it very likely had lost much in that removal, still itwas a genuine off-shoot of the home-made or "folk" civilization of theSouth of England. No wonder that its survivals had struck me asvenerable and pleasant, when there was so much vigorous English lifebehind them, derived perhaps from so many fair English counties. 

The perception came to me only just in time, for to-day theopportunities of further observation occur but rarely. The old life isbeing swiftly obliterated. The valley is passing out of the hands of itsformer inhabitants. They are being crowded into corners, and arebecoming as aliens in their own home; they are receding before newcomerswith new ideas, and, greatest change of all, they are yielding to thedominion of new ideas themselves. At present, therefore, the cottagersare a most heterogeneous population, presenting all sorts of bafflingproblems to those who have to deal with them, as the schoolmaster andthe sanitary officer and others find. In no two families--hardly in twomembers of the same family--do the old traditions survive in equaldegree. A lath-and-plaster partition may separate people who are half acentury asunder in civilization, and on the same bench at school may befound side by side two children who come from homes, the one worthy ofKing George III. 's time, the other not unworthy of King George V. 's. Butthe changes which will remove the greatest of these discrepancies areproceeding very fast; in another ten years' time there will be not muchleft of the traditional life whose crumbling away I have been witnessingduring the twenty years that are gone. 

Some grounds of hope--great hope, too--which begin at last to appear, and are treated of in the final chapter of this book, save the tale ofChange in the Village from being quite a tragedy, yet still it is amelancholy tale. I have dealt with it in the two sections calledrespectively "The Altered Circumstances" and "The Resulting Needs. " Theearlier chapters, which immediately follow this one under the heading"The Present Time, " are merely descriptive of the people and theirconditions as I know them now, and aim at nothing more than to pave theway for a clearer understanding of the main subject. 

II

THE PRESENT TIME

II

SELF-RELIANCE

There is a chapter in Dickens's _Hard Times_ which tells how it wasdiscovered that somebody had fallen down a disused mine-shaft, and howthe rescue was valiantly effected by a few men who had to be awakenedfor that end from their drunken Sunday afternoon sleep. Sobered by thedangers they foresaw, these men ran to the pit-mouth, pushed straight tothe centre of the crowd there, and fell to work quietly with their ropesand winches. As you read, you seem to see them, spitting on their greathands while they knot the ropes, listening attentively to the doctor asto an equal, and speaking in undertones to one another, but regardlessof the remarks of the bystanders. The best man amongst them, saysDickens--and you know it to be true: Dickens could have told you themen's names and life-history had he chosen--the best man amongst themwas the greatest drunkard of the lot; and when his heroic work was done, nobody seems to have taken any farther notice of him. 

These were Northcountrymen; but there was a quality about them of whichI have often been reminded, in watching or hearing tell of the men inthis Surrey village. It is the thing that most impresses all who comeinto any sympathetic contact with my neighbours their readiness to makea start at the dangerous or disagreeable task when others would be stilltalking, and their apparent expectation that they will succeed. In thisspirit they occasionally do things quite as well worthy of mention asthe incident described by Dickens. I remember looking on myself at justsuch another piece of work, in the town a mile away from here, onewinter day. The sluggish "river, " as we call it, which flows amongstmeadows on the south of the town, is usually fordable beside one of thebridges, and men with horses and carts as often as not drive through theford, instead of going over the bridge. But on the day I am recallingfloods had so swollen the stream that a horse and cart were swept downunder the narrow bridge, and had got jammed there, the driver havingescaped over the iron railings of the bridge as the cart went under. Idon't know what became of him then--he was but a lad, I was told. When Icame on the scene, a number of people were on the bridge, while manymore were down on the river banks, whence they could see the horse andcart under the arch. A few were bawling out unheeded advice as to whatshould be done; in fact, a heated altercation had arisen between the twoloudest--a chimney-sweep and a medical man--whose theories disagreed;but it was plain to everybody that it would be a risky thing to ventureunder the bridge into that swirling stream. For ten minutes or more, while the horse remained invisible to us on the bridge, and likely todrown, the dispute snapped angrily from bank to bank, punctuatedoccasionally by excited cries, such as "He's gettin' lower!" "He'ssinkin' down!" Then, unobserved, a bricklayer's labourer came runningwith a rope, which he hurriedly made into a noose and tightened underhis armpits. None of the shouters, by the way, had suggested such aplan. The man was helped over the railings and swiftly lowered--Heavenknows who took a hand at that--and so he disappeared for five minutes. Then a shout: the horse came into view, staggering downstream withharness cut, and scrambled up into the meadow; and the man, drenched anddeadly white, and too benumbed to help himself, was hauled up on to thebridge, and carried to the nearest inn. I never heard his name--peopleof his sort, as Dickens knew, are generally anonymous--but he was one ofthe labourers of the locality, and only last winter I saw him shiveringat the street corners amongst other out-o'-works. 

Behaviour like this is so characteristic of labouring men that we othersexpect it of them as if it were especially their duty. Again and again Ihave noticed it. If a horse falls in the street, ten chances to one itis some obscure labouring fellow who gets him up again. Whether there isdanger or no, in emergencies which demand readiness and disregard ofcomfort, the common unskilled labourer is always to the fore. One summernight I had strolled out to the top of the road here which slants down, over-arched by tall trees, past the Vicarage. At some distance down, where there should have been such a depth of darkness under the trees, Iwas surprised to see a little core of light, where five or six peoplestood around a bright lamp, which one of them was holding. The scenelooked so theatrical, glowing under the trees with the summer night allround it, that, of course, I had to go down the hill and investigate it. The group I joined was, it turned out, watching a bicyclist who layunconscious in somebody's arms, while a doctor fingered at a streamingwound in the man's forehead, and washed it, and finally stitched it up. The bicycle--its front wheel buckled by collision with the Vicaragegatepost--stood against the gate, and two or three cushions lay in thehedge; for the Vicar had come out to the man's assistance, and had sentfor the doctor, and it was the Vicar himself, old and grey, but steady, who now held his library lamp for the doctor's use. The rest of us stoodlooking on, one of us at least feeling rather sick at the sight, and allof us as useless as the night-moths which came out from the trees andfluttered round the lamp. At last, when all was done, and the injuredman could be moved, there rose up a hitherto unnoticed fellow who hadbeen supporting him, and I recognized one of our village labourers. Helooked faint, and tottered to a chair which the Vicar had ready, andgulped at some brandy, for he, too, had been overcome by sight of thesurgery. But it was to him that the task of sitting in the dusty roadand being smeared with blood had fallen. 

And this quiet acceptance of the situation, recognizing that he ifanyone must suffer, and take the hard place which soils the clothes andshocks the feelings, gives the clue to the average labourer's temper. Itis really very curious to think of. Rarely can a labourer afford theluxury of a "change. " Wet through though his clothes may be, orblood-stained, or smothered with mud or dust, he must wear them until hegoes to bed, and must put them on again as he finds them in the morning;but this does not excuse him in our eyes from taking the disagreeableplace. Still less does it excuse him in his own eyes. If you offer tohelp, men of this kind will probably dissuade you. "It'll make yerclothes all dirty, " they say; "you'll get in such a mess. " So theyassume the burden, sometimes surly and swearing, oftener with agood-tempered jest. 

To anything with a touch of humour in it they will leap forward likeschoolboys. I am reminded of a funny incident one frosty morning, whenpatches of the highway were slippery as glass. Preceding me along theroad was a horse and cart, driven by a boy who stood upright in thecart, and seemed not to notice how the horse's hoofs were skidding; andsome distance ahead three railway navvies were approaching, just offtheir night's work, and carrying their picks and shovels. I had left thecart behind, and was near these three, when suddenly they burst into alaugh, exclaiming to one another, "Look at that old 'oss!" I turned. There sat the horse on his tail between the shafts, pawing with hisforefeet at the road, but unable to get a grip at its slippery surface. It was impossible not to smile; he had such an absurd look. The navvies, however, did more than smile. They broke into a run; they sawimmediately what to do. In thirty seconds they were shovelling earth outfrom the hedgerow under the horse's feet, and in two minutes more he hadscrambled up, unhurt. 

In such behaviour, I say, we have a clue to the labouring-man's temper. The courage, the carelessness of discomfort, the swiftness to see whatshould be done, and to do it, are not inspired by any tradition ofchivalry, any consciously elaborated cult. It is habitual with these mento be ready, and those fine actions which win our admiration are butchance disclosures in public of a self-reliance constantly practised bythe people amongst themselves--by the women quite as much as by themen--under stress of necessity, one would say at first sight. Takeanother example of the same willing efficiency applied in rather adifferent way. In a cottage near to where I am writing a young labourerdied last summer--a young unmarried man, whose mother was living withhim, and had long depended on his support. Eighteen months earlier hehad been disabled for a week or two by the kick of a horse, and aheart-disease of long standing was so aggravated by the accident that hewas never again able to do much work. There came months of unemployment, and as a consequence he was in extreme poverty when he died. His motherwas already reduced to parish relief; it was only by the help of his twosisters--young women out at service, who managed to pay for a coffin forhim--that a pauper's funeral was avoided. A labourer's wife, the motherof four or five young children, took upon herself the duty of washingand laying out the corpse, but there remained still the funeral to bemanaged. An undertaker to conduct it could not be engaged; there was nomoney to pay him. Then, however, neighbours took the matter up, not asan unwonted thing, I may say--it is usual with them to help bury a"mate"--only, as a rule, there is the undertaker too. In this case theydid without him--six poor men losing half a day's work, and giving theirservices. The coffin was too big to be carried down the crookedstaircase; too big also to be got out of the bedroom window until thewindow-sashes had been taken out. But these men managed it all, borrowing tools and a couple of ladders and some ropes; and then, in theblack clothes which they keep for such occasions, they carried thecoffin to the churchyard. That same evening two of them went to work atcleaning out a cess-pit, two others spent the evening in their gardens, another had cows to milk, and the sixth, being out of work and restless, had no occupation to go home to so far as I know. 

Of course this, too, was a piece of voluntary service, resembling inthat respect those more striking examples of self-reliance which arebrought out by sudden emergencies. But it points, more directly thanthey do, to the sphere in which that virtue is practised until itbecomes a habit. For if you follow the clue on, it leads very quickly tothe scene where self-reliance is so to speak at home, where it seems thenatural product of the people's circumstances--the scene, namely, oftheir daily work. For there, not only in the employment by which the menearn their wages, but in the household and garden work of the women aswell as the men, there is nothing to support them save their ownreadiness, their own personal force. 

It sounds a truism, but it is worth attention. Unlike the rest of us, labouring people are unable to shirk any of life's discomforts by"getting a man" or "a woman, " as we say, to do the disagreeable or riskyjobs which continually need to be done. If a cottager in this villagewants his chimney swept, or his pigstye cleaned out, or his firewoodchopped, the only "man" he can get to do it for him is himself. Similarly with his wife. She may not call in "a woman" to scrub herfloor, or to wash and mend, or to skin a rabbit for dinner, or to makeup the fire for cooking it. It is necessary for her to be ready to turnfrom one task to another without squeamishness, and without pausing tothink how she shall do it. In short, she and her husband alike mustpractise, in their daily doings, a sort of intrepidity which growscustomary with them; and this habit is the parent of much of that fineconduct which they exhibit so carelessly in moments of emergency. 

Until this fact is appreciated there is no such thing as understandingthe people's disposition. It is the principal gateway that lets you into their character. Nevertheless the subject needs no furtherillustration here. Anyone personally acquainted with the villagers knowshow their life is one continuous act of unconscious self-reliance, andthose who have not seen it for themselves will surely discover plentifulevidences of it in the following pages, if they read between the lines. 

But I must digress to remark upon one aspect of the matter. In view ofthe subject of this book--namely, the transition from an old socialorder to present times--it should be considered whether the handiness ofthe villagers is after all quite so natural a thing as is commonlysupposed. For a long time I took it for granted. The people'saccomplishments were rough, I admit, and not knowing how much "knack" orexperience was involved in the dozens of odd jobs that they did, Iassumed that they did them by the light of Nature. Yet if we reflect howlittle we learn from Nature, and how helpless people grow after two orthree generations of life in slums, or in libraries and drawing-rooms, it would seem probable that there is more than appears on the surface inthe labourer's versatility of usefulness. After all, who would know bythe light of Nature how to go about sweeping a chimney, as they used todo it here, with rope and furzebush dragged down? or how to scour out awatertank effectively? or where to begin upon cleaning a pigstye? Easythough it looks, the closer you get down to this kind of work as thecottager does it the more surprisedly do you discover that he recognizesright and wrong methods of doing it; and my own belief is that thenecessity which compels the people to be their own servants would notmake them so adaptable as they are, were there not, at the back of them, a time-honoured tradition teaching them how to go on. 

Returning from this digression, and speaking, too, rather of a periodfrom ten to twenty years ago than of the present time, it would befoolish to pretend that the people's good qualities were unattended bydefects. The men had a very rough exterior, so rough that I have knownthem to inspire timidity in the respectable who met them on the road, and especially at night, when, truth to tell, those of them who wereout were not always too sober. After you got to know them, so as tounderstand the shut of their mouths and the look of their eyes--usuallyvery steadfast and quiet--you knew that there was rarely any harm inthem; but I admit that their aspect was unpromising enough at firstsight. A stranger might have been forgiven for thinking them coarse, ignorant, stupid, beery, unclean. And yet there was excuse for much ofit, while much more of it was sheer ill-fortune, and needed no excuse. Though many of the men were physically powerful, few of them could boastof any physical comeliness. Their strength had been bought dear, at thecost of heavy labour begun too early in life, so that before middle-agethey were bent in the back, or gone wrong at the knees, and their walk(some of them walked miles every day to their work) was a long shamblingstride, fast enough, but badly wanting in suggestiveness of personalpride. Seeing them casually in their heavy and uncleanly clothes, no onewould have dreamed of the great qualities in them--the kindliness andcourage and humour, the readiness to help, the self-control, thepatience. It was all there, but they took no pains to look the part;they did not show off. 

In fact, their tendency was rather in the contrary direction. They caredtoo little what was thought of them to be at the pains of shocking one'sdelicacy intentionally; but they were by no means displeased to bethought "rough. " It made them laugh; it was a tribute to theirstout-heartedness. Nor was there anything necessarily braggart in thisattitude of theirs. As they realized that work would not be readilyoffered to a man who might quail before its unpleasantness, so it was amatter of bread-and-cheese to them to cultivate "roughness. " I need not, indeed, be writing in the past tense here. It is still bad policy for aworkman to be nice in his feelings, and several times I have had menexcuse themselves for a weakness which they knew me to share, but whichthey seemed to think needed apology when they, too, exhibited it. Only afew weeks ago a neighbour's cat, affected with mange, was haunting mygarden, and had become a nuisance. Upon my asking the owner--a labourerwho had worked up to be something of a bricklayer--to get rid of it, hesaid he would get a certain old-fashioned neighbour to kill it, and thenhe plunged into sheepish explanations why he would rather not do thedeed himself. "Anybody else's cat, " he urged, "he wouldn't mind somuch, " but he had a touch of softness towards his own. It was plain thatin reality he was a man of tender feelings, yet it was no less plainthat he was unwilling to be thought too tender. The curious thing wasthat neither of us considered for a moment the possibility of anyreluctance staying the hand of the older neighbour. Him we both knewfairly well as a man of that earlier period with which I am concernedjust now. At that period the village in general had a lofty contemptfor the "meek-hearted" man capable of flinching. An employer might havequalms, though the men thought no better of him for that possession, butamongst themselves flinching was not much other than a vice. In fact, they dared not be delicate. Hence through all their demeanour theydisplayed a hardness which in some cases went far below the surface, andapproached real brutality. 

Leaving out the brutality, the women were not very different from themen. It might have been supposed that their domestic work--the cookingand cleaning and sewing from which middle-class women seem often toderive so comely a manner--would have done something to soften thesecottage women. But it rarely worked out so. The women shared the men'scarelessness and roughness. That tenderness which an emergencydiscovered in them was hidden in everyday life under manners indicativeof an unfeigned contempt for what was gentle, what was soft. 

And this, too, was reasonable. In theory, perhaps, the women should havebeen refined by their housekeeping work; in practice that worknecessitated their being very tough. Cook, scullery-maid, bed-maker, charwoman, laundress, children's nurse--it fell to every mother of afamily to play all the parts in turn every day, and if that were all, there was opportunity enough for her to excel. But the convenienceswhich make such work tolerable in other households were not to be foundin the cottage. Everything had to be done practically in one room--whichwas sometimes a sleeping-room too, or say in one room and a wash-house. The preparation and serving of meals, the airing of clothes and theironing of them, the washing of the children, the mending andmaking--how could a woman do any of it with comfort in the crampedapartment, into which, moreover, a tired and dirty man came home in theevening to eat and wash and rest, or if not to rest, then to potter inand out from garden or pig-stye, "treading in dirt" as he came? Then, too, many cottages had not so much as a sink where work with water couldbe done; many had no water save in wet weather; there was not onecottage in which it could be drawn from a tap, but it all had to befetched from well or tank. And in the husband's absence at work, it wasthe woman's duty--one more added to so many others--to bring waterindoors. In times of drought water had often to be carried longdistances in pails, and it may be imagined how the housework would go insuch circumstances. For my part I have never wondered at roughness orsqualor in the village since that parching summer when I learnt that inone cottage at least the people were saving up the cooking water of oneday to be used over again on the day following. Where such things canhappen the domestic arts are simplified to nothing, and it would bemadness in women to cultivate refinement or niceness. 

And my neighbours appeared not to wish to cultivate them. It may beadded that many of the women--the numbers are diminishing rapidly--werefield-workers who had never been brought up to much domesticity. Farbeyond the valley they had to go to earn money at hop-tying, haymaking, harvesting, potato-picking, swede-trimming, and at such work they cameimmediately, just as the men did, under conditions which made it a viceto flinch. As a rule they would leave work in the afternoon in time toget home and cook a meal in readiness for their husbands later, and atthat hour one saw them on the roads trudging along, under the burden ofcoats, dinner-baskets, tools, and so on, very dishevelled--for atfield-work there is no such thing as care for the toilet--but oftenchatting not unhappily. 

On the roads, too, women were, and still are, frequently noticeable, bringing home on their backs faggots of dead wood, or sacks offir-cones, picked up in the fir-woods a mile away or more. Prodigiousand unwieldy loads these were. I have often met women bent nearly doubleunder them, toiling painfully along, with hats or bonnets pushed awryand skirts draggling. Occasionally tiny urchins, too small to be left athome alone, would be clinging to their mothers' frocks. 

In the scanty leisure that the women might enjoy--say now and then of anafternoon--there were not many circumstances to counteract the hardnesscontracted at their work. These off times were opportunities for socialintercourse between them. They did not leave home, however, and go out"paying calls. " Unless on Sunday evenings visiting one another'scottages was not desirable. But there were other resources. I havementioned how sounds will travel across the valley, and I have knownwomen come to their cottage doors high up on this side to carry on ashouting conversation with neighbours opposite, four hundred yards away. You see, they were under no constraint of propriety in its acceptedforms, nor did they care greatly who heard what they had to say. I havesometimes wished that they did care. But, of course, the morecomfortable way of intercourse was to talk across the quickset hedgebetween two gardens. Sometimes one would hear--all an afternoon itseemed--the long drone of one of these confabulations going on inunbroken flow, with little variation of cadence, save for a moaning riseand fall, like the wind through a keyhole. I have a suspicion that theshortcomings of neighbours often made the staple of such conversations, but that is only a surmise. I remember the strange conclusion of one ofthem which reached my ears. For, as the women reluctantly parted, theyraised their voices, and one said piously, "Wal, they'll git paid for't, one o' these days. Gawd A'mighty's above the Devil"; to which theother, with loud conviction: "Yes, and always will be, thank Gawd!" Thisended the talk. But the last speaker, turning round, saw hertwo-year-old daughter asprawl in the garden, and with sudden change fromsatisfied drawl to shrill exasperation, "Git up out of all that muck, you dirty little devil, " she said. For she was a cleanly woman, proud ofher children, and disliking to see them untidy. 

III

MAN AND WIFE

For general social intercourse the labouring people do not meet at oneanother's cottages, going out by invitation, or dropping in to tea inthe casual way of friendship; they have to be content with "passing thetime of day" when they come together by chance. Thus two families maymingle happily as they stroll homewards after the Saturday night'sshopping in the town, or on a fine Sunday evening they may make uplittle parties to go and inspect one another's gardens. 

Until recently--so recently that the slight change may be ignored atleast for the present--the prevailing note of this so restrictedintercourse was a sort of _bonhomie_, or good temper and good sense. With this for a guide, the people had no need of the etiquette called"good manners, " but were at liberty to behave as they liked, and talk asthey liked, within the bounds of neighbourliness and civility. This hasalways been one of the most conspicuous things about the people--thisindependence of conventions. In few other grades of society could menand women dare to be so outspoken together, so much at ease, as thesevillagers still often are. Their talk grows Chaucerian at times. Merrily, or seriously, as the case may be, subjects are spoken of whichare never alluded to between men and women who respect our ordinaryconventions. 

Let it be admitted--if anybody wishes to feel superior--that the womenmust be wanting in "delicacy" to countenance such things. There areother aspects of the matter which are better worth considering. Approaching it, for instance, from an opposite point of view, oneperceives that the average country labourer can talk with less restraintbecause he has really less to conceal than many men who look down uponhim. He may use coarse words, but his thoughts are wont to be cleanly, so that there is no suspicion of foulness behind his conversation, rankthough it sound. A woman consequently may hear what he says, and not beoffended by suggestion of something left unsaid. On these terms thejolly tale is a jolly tale, and ends at that. It does not linger tocorrupt the mind with an unsavoury after-flavour. 

But more than this is indicated by the want of conventional manners inthe village. The main fact is that the two sexes, each engaged dailyupon essential duties, stand on a surprising equality the one to theother. And where the men are so well aware of the women's experiencedoutlook, and the women so well aware of the men's, the affectation ofignorance might almost be construed as a form of immodesty, or at anyrate as an imprudence. It would, indeed, be too absurd to pretend thatthese wives and mothers, who have to face every trial of life and deathfor themselves, do not know the things which obviously they cannot helpknowing; too absurd to treat them as though they were all innocence, andtimidity, and daintiness. No labouring man would esteem a woman fordelicacy of that kind, and the women certainly would not like to beesteemed for it. Hence the sexes habitually meet on almost level terms. And the absence of convention extends to a neglect--nay, to adislike--of ordinary graceful courtesies between them. So far as I haveseen they observe no ceremonial. The men are considerate to spare womenthe more exhausting or arduous kinds of work; but they will let a womanopen the door for herself, and will be careless when they are togetherwho stands or who sits, or which of them walks on the inside of thepath, or goes first into a gateway. And the women look for nothingdifferent. They expect to be treated as equals. If a cottage woman foundthat a cottage man was raising his hat to her, she would be aflame withindignation, and would let him know very plainly indeed that she was notthat sort of fine lady. 

In general, the relations between the sexes are too matter-of-fact topermit of any refinement of feeling about them, and it is not surprisingthat illegitimacy has been very common in the village. But once a manand a woman are married, they settle down into a sober pair of comrades, and instead of the looseness which might be looked for there is on thewhole a remarkable fidelity between the married couples. I have nodistinct memory of having heard during twenty years of any certain caseof intrigue or conjugal misbehaviour amongst the cottage folk. Thepeople seem to leave that sort of thing to the employing classes. Itscandalizes them to hear of it. They despise it. Oddly enough, this maybe partly due to the want of a feminine ideal, such as is developed byhelp of our middle-class arts and recognized in our conventions. True, the business of making both ends meet provides the labourer and his wifewith enough to think about, especially when the children begin to come. Then, too, they have no luxuries to pamper their flesh, no lazy hours inwhich to grow wanton. The severity of the man's daily labour keeps himquiet; the woman, drudge that she is, soon loses the surface charm thatwould excite admirers. But when all this is said, it remains probablethat a lowliness in their ideal preserves the villagers from temptation. They do not put woman on a pedestal to be worshipped; they areunacquainted with the finer, more sensitive, more high-strungpossibilities of her nature. People who have been affected by longtraditions of chivalry, or by the rich influences of art, are in anothercase; but here amongst the labouring folk a woman is not seen throughthe medium of any cherished theories; she is merely an individualwoman, a man's comrade and helper, and the mother of his family. It is afine thing, though, about the unions effected on these unromantic terms, that they usually last long, the man and wife growing more affectionate, more tender, more trustful, as they advance in years. 

Of course, the marriages are not invariably comfortable or eventolerable. One hears sometimes of men callously disappearing--desertingtheir wives for a period, and going off, as if for peace, to distantparts wherever there is work to be picked up. One man, I remember, wasreported to have said, when he ultimately reappeared, that he had goneaway because "he thought it would do his wife good. " Another, who hadopenly quarrelled with his wife and departed, was discovered monthsafterwards working in a Sussex harvest-field. He came back by-and-by, and now for years the couple have been living together, not withoutoccasional brawls, it's true, but in the main good comrades, certainlyhelpful to one another, and very fond of their two or three children. Abad case was that of a bullying railway navvy, who, having knocked hiswife about and upset his old father, went off ostensibly to work. Inreality he made his way by train to a town some ten miles distant, andfrom there, in a drunken frolic, sent a telegram home to his wifeannouncing that he was dead. He had given no particulars: a long searchfor him followed, and he was found some days later in a public-house ofthat town vaingloriously drinking. I remember that Bettesworth, who toldme this tale, was full of indignation. "Shouldn't you think he could bepunished for that?" he asked. "There, if I had my way he should havetwelve months reg'lar _hard labour_, and see if that wouldn't dummer alittle sense into 'n. " There was no suggestion, however, of "a woman inthe case, " to explain this man's ill-treatment of his wife; it appearsto have been simply a piece of freakish brutality. 

When disagreements occur, it is likely that the men are oftener to blamethan their wives. Too often I have seen some woman or other of thevillage getting her drunken and abusive husband home, and never oncehave I seen it the other way about. Nevertheless, in some lucklesshouseholds the faults are on the woman's side, and it is the man who hasthe heartache. I knew one man--a most steady and industrious fellow, inconstant work which kept him from home all day--whose wife became a sortof parasite on him in the interest of her own thriftless relatives. Inhis absence her brothers and sisters were at his table eating at hisexpense; food and coals bought with his earnings found their way to hermother's cottage; in short, he had "married the family, " as they say. Heknew it, too. In its trumpery way the affair was an open scandal, andthe neighbours dearly wished to see him put a stop to it. Yet, though hewould have had public opinion to support him in taking strong measures, his own good nature deterred him from doing so. Probably, too, his owncourse was the happier one. Thrive he never could, and gloomy enough anddispirited enough he used to look at times; yet to see him with hischildren on Sundays--two or three squalid, laughing urchins--was to seea very acceptable sight. 

Returning to the main point, if anyone has a taste for ugly behaviour, and thinks nothing "real" but what is uncomfortable too, he may findplenty of subjects for study in the married life of this parish; but hewill be ridiculously mistaken if he supposes the ugliness to be normal. A kind of dogged comradeship--I can find no better word for it--is whatcommonly unites the labouring man and his wife; they are partners andequals running their impecunious affairs by mutual help. I was latelyable to observe a man and woman after a removal settling down into theirnew quarters. It was the most ordinary, matter-of-fact affair in theworld. The man, uncouth and strong, like a big dog or an amiable bigboy, moved about willingly under his wife's direction, doing the variousjobs that required strength. One evening, in rain, his wife stoodwatching while he chopped away the wet summer grass that had grown tallunder the garden hedge; then she pointed out four or five spots againstthe hedge, where he proceeded to put in wooden posts. Early the nextmorning there was a clothes-line between the posts, and the householdwashing was hanging from it. Nothing could have been more commonplacethan the whole incident, but the commonness was the beauty of it. And itwas done somehow in a way that warmed one to a feeling of great likingfor those two people. 

Very often it seems to be the woman who supplies the brains, and doesthe scheming, for the partnership. When old Bettesworth was on his lastlegs, as many as half a dozen different men applied to me for his job, of whom one, I very well remember, apologized for troubling me, but saidhis "missus" told him to come. Poor chap! it was his idea of courtesy tooffer an apology, and it was the Old Adam in him that laid the blame onhis wife, for really he desired very much to escape from his arduousnight-work on the railway. At the same time there is not the least doubtthat what he said was true; that he and his wife had talked the matterover, and that, when he proved timid of interviewing me, she forced himto come. Again, two or three winters ago, a man despairing of work inEngland got in touch with some agency to assist him in emigrating toCanada. It was his wife then who went round the parish trying to raisethe few extra pounds that he was to contribute. That was a case to fillcomfortable people with uncomfortable shame. The woman, not more thanfive-and-twenty, would have been strikingly handsome if she had ever inher life had a fair chance; but as it was she looked half-starved, andshe had a cough which made it doubtful if she would ever live to followher husband to Canada. Still, she was playing her part as the man'scomrade. As soon as he could save enough money he was to send for herand her baby, she said; in the meantime she would have to earn her ownliving by going out to day-work. 

During the South African War there was many a woman in the villagekeeping things together at home while the men were at the front. Theyhad to work and earn money just as they do when their men are beatendown at home. There was one woman who received from her husband a copyof verses composed by him and his companions during their occupation ofa block-house on the veldt. Very proud of him, she took the verses to aprinter, had them printed--just one single copy--and then had theprinted copy framed to hang on the bedroom wall in her cottage. Herhusband showed it to me there one day, mightily pleased with it and her. 

Probably the people behind the counters at the provision shops in thetown could tell many interesting things about the relations betweenmarried people of this class, for it is quite the common thing in thevillages for a man and wife to lock up their cottage on a Saturdayevening, and go off with the children to do the week's shoppingtogether. On a nice night the town becomes thronged with them, and so dothe shops, outside which, now and then, a passer-by may notice littleconsultations going on, and husband or wife--sometimes one, sometimesthe other--handing over precious money to the other to be spent. And ifit is rather painful to see the faces grow so strained and anxious oversuch trifling sums, on the other hand the signs of mutual confidence andsupport are comforting. Besides, anxiety is not the commonest note. Themajority of the people make a little weekly festivity of this Saturdaynight's outing; they meet their friends in the street, have a chat, windup with a visit to the public-house, and so homewards at any timebetween seven and ten o'clock, trooping up the hill happily enough as arule. Now and then one comes across solitary couples making one anothermiserable. Thus one night I heard a woman's voice in the dark, verytired and faint, say, "It's a long hill!" to which the surly tones of aman replied: "'Ten't no longer than 'twas, is it?" Brutishness likethis, however, is quite the exception. 

As a sample of what is normal, take the following scraps of talkoverheard one summer night some years ago. The people were late thatnight, and indeed, it was pleasant to be out. Not as yet were there anyof those street lamps along the road which now make all nights alikedingy; but one felt as if walking into the unspoiled country. For thoughit was after ten, and the sky overcast, still one could see very clearlythe glimmering road and the hedgerows in the soft midsummer twilight. Enjoying this tranquillity, I passed by a man and woman with twochildren, and heard the man say invitingly: "Shall I carry the basket?"The wife answered: "'E en't 'eavy, Bill, thanks. .. . Only I got this 'erelittle Rosy to git along. "

Her voice sounded gentle and cheerful, and I tried to hear more, checking my pace. But the children were walking too slowly. I wasgetting out of earshot, missing the drift of the peaceful-soundingchatter, when presently the woman, as if turning to the other child, said more loudly: "Come along, Sonny!" The man added: "Hullo, old man!Come along! You'll be left behind!"

The children began prattling; their father and mother laughed; but I wasleaving them farther and farther behind. Then, however, some otherhomeward-goer overtook the little family. For the talk grew suddenlylouder, the woman beginning cheerily: "Hullo, Mr. Weatherall! 'Ow's yourpoor wife?. .. I didn't see as 'twas you, 'till this here little Rosysaid. .. . "

What Rosy had said I failed to catch. I missed also what followed, leading up to the woman's endearing remark: "This 'ere little Rosy, she's a reg'lar gal for cherries!" The neighbour seemed to saysomething; then the husband; then the neighbour again. And at that therecame a burst of laughter, loudest from the woman, and Mr. Weatherallasked: "Didn't you never hear that afore?"

The woman, laughing still, was emphatic: "No; I'll take my oath as Inever knowed that. "

"Well, you knows it now, don't ye?"

"I ain't sure yet. I ain't had time to consider. "

After that the subject changed. I heard the woman say: "I've had sixgals an' only one boy--one out o' seven. Alice is out courtin'"; andthen they seemed to get on to the question of ways and means. The lastwords that reached me were "Fivepence . .. Tuppence-ha'penny;" but still, when I could no longer catch any details at all, the voices continued tosound pleasantly good-tempered. 

IV

MANIFOLD TROUBLES

Besides the unrelieved hardness of daily life--the need, which neverlifts from them, of making shift and doing all things forthemselves--there has always been another influence at work upon myneighbours, leaving its indelible mark on them. Almost from infancyonwards, in a most personal and intimate way, they are familiar withharrowing experiences of calamity such as people who employ them arelargely able to escape. The little children are not exempt. There beingno nursemaids to take care of the children while fathers and mothers arebusy, the tiniest are often entrusted to the perilous charge of othersnot quite so tiny, and occasionally they come to grief. Then too oftenthe older children, who are themselves more secure for a few years, areeyewitnesses of occurrences such as more fortunate boys and girls arehardly allowed even to hear of. Nor is it only with the gory or horribledisaster that the people thus become too early acquainted. Thenauseating details of sickness are better known and more openlydiscussed in the cottage than in comfortable middle-class homes. For itis all such a crowded business--that of living in these crampeddwellings. Besides, the injured and the sick, absorbed in the interestof their ailments, are amiably willing to give others an opportunity ofsharing it. The disorder or the disablement is thus almost a familypossession. An elderly man, who had offered to show me a terrible ulceron his leg, smiled at my squeamishness, as if he pitied me, when Ideclined the privilege. "Why, the little un, " he said, pointing to afour-year-old girl on the floor, "the little un rolls the bandage for meevery evening, because I dresses'n here before the fire. " That is theway in the labourer's cottage. Even where privacy is attempted for thesufferer's sake there is no refuge for the family from the evidence ofsuffering. The young people in one room may hardly avoid knowing andhearing where a man is dying, or a woman giving birth to a child, justthe other side of a latched deal door. 

In this connection it should be remembered how much more than theirshare of the afflictions of the community falls to the labouring people. The men's work naturally takes them where accidents happen, wheredisease is contracted. And then, from ignorance or the want ofconveniences, from the need to continue wage-earning as long asendurance will hold out, and also from the sheer carelessness which is apart of their necessary habit, both the men and the women not seldomallow themselves to fall into sickness which a little self-indulgence, if only they dared yield to it, would enable them to avoid. I shouldnot know how to begin counting the numbers I have personally knownenfeebled for life in this way. Things are better now than they weretwenty years ago; there are many more opportunities than there used tobe of obtaining rest or nursing, but still the evil is widespread. Without going out of my way at all, during the last fortnight I haveheard of--have almost stumbled across--three cases of the sort. Thefirst was that of a woman who had been taking in washing during herhusband's long illness. Meeting the man, who was beginning to creepabout again, I happened to ask how his wife was; and he said that shewas just able to keep going, but hardly knew how to stand because ofvaricose veins in both legs. The second case, too, was a woman's. Shemet me on the road, and on the off chance asked if I could give her aletter of admission to the County Hospital, and so save her the pain ofgoing down to the Vicarage to beg for a letter there. What was thematter? "I give birth to twins five months ago, " she said, "and sincethen dropsy have set in. I gets heavier every day. The doctor wants meto go to the hospital, and I was goin' to the Vicar to ask for a letter, but I dreads comin' back up that hill. " As it was she had already walkedhalf a mile. In the third case a man's indifference to his own sufferingwas to blame for the plight in which he found himself. Driving a van, hehad barked his shin against the iron step on the front of the van. Justas the skin had begun to heal over he knocked it again, severely, inexactly the same way, and he described to me the immense size of theaggravated wound. But, as he said, he had supposed it would get well, and, beyond tying his leg up with a rag, he took no further troubleabout it, until it grew so bad that he was obliged to see a doctor. Hisaccount of the interview went in this way: "'How long since you donethis?' the doctor says. 'A month, ' I says. 'Then you must be a damn foolnot to 'ave come to me afore, ' the doctor says. " The man, indeed, lookedjust as likely as not to be laid up for six months, if not permanentlycrippled, as a result of his carelessness. 

Yet, common as such cases are now, they were commoner when I first knewthe village--when there was no cottage hospital, no proper accommodationat the workhouse infirmary, no parish nurse, and when the parishcontained few people of means to help those who were in distress. Iremember once looking round in that early period, and noting how therewas hardly a cottage to be seen which had not, to my own knowledge, beenrecently visited by trouble of some sort or another. True, the troubleswere not all of them of a kind that could be avoided by any precaution, for some of them arose from the death of old people. Yet in a littlecottage held on a weekly tenancy death often involves the survivors ofthe family in more disturbance, more privation too, than it doeselsewhere. Putting these cases aside, however, I could still see where, within two hundred yards of me, there had been four other deaths--onebeing that of an infant, and one that of a woman in child-birth. In theother two cases the victims were strong men--one, a railway worker, whowas killed on the line; the other a carter, who died of injuriesreceived in an accident with his horse. The list of lesser misfortunesincluded the illness of a man who broke down while at work, withhęmorrhage of the stomach, and the bad case of a bricklayer's labourer, who lay for days raving from the effects of a sunstroke. Inpre-Christian times it might have been argued that the gods wereoffended with the people, so thickly did disasters fall upon them, butmy neighbours seemed unaware of anything abnormal in the circumstances. By lifelong experience they had learned to take calamity almost as amatter of course. 

For, as I said, the experience begins early. The children, the younggirls, have their share of it. During those earlier years I amrecalling, a little girl of the village, who was just beginning domesticservice in my household, was, within the space of six months, personallyconcerned in two accidents to little children. She came from one ofhalf-a-dozen families whose cottages, for a wonder in this village, stood in a row; and amongst scraps of her talk which were repeated to meI heard how her little brother--only five years old, but strong atthrowing stones--threw at a girl playmate and knocked out one of hereyes. That happened in the springtime. In the autumn of the same year amishap, if possible more shocking at the moment, befell another child inthat row of cottages. A man there one evening was trimming a low hedge. His tool was a fag-hook--well sharpened, for he was one of the ablestmen in the village. And near by where he worked his children were atplay, the youngest of them being between three and four years old. 

As he reached over the hedge, to chop downwards at the farther side, this little one suddenly came running dangerously near. "Take care, ducky!" he cried. "Don't come so close, 'r else perhaps father'll cutye. "

He gave three more strokes, and again the child ran in. The hook fell, right across the neck. I had these particulars from a neighbour. "If 'thad bin another half inch round, the doctor said, 'twould have bininstant death. .. . The man was covered with blood, and all the ground, too. I was at work when I heared of it, but I couldn't go on after that, it upset me so. .. . And all this mornin' I can't get it out o' my mind. There's a shiver all up that row. They be all talkin' of it. The poorlittle thing en't dead this mornin', and that's all's you can say. Theybin up all night. Ne'er a one of 'em didn't go to bed. "

So far the neighbour. Later the little maidservant, who had gone homethat evening, told me: "We was passin' by at the time--me and my oldersister. .. . She run in and wrapped a towel round its neck. "

"Where, then, was the mother?"

"She was with its father. He'd fainted. So we went in. We thought p'rapswe could run for the doctor. But she went herself, jest as she was, "carrying the child down to the town. 

As for the girl's sister, who had behaved with some aplomb, "It made herfeel rather bad afterwards. She felt sick. All the floor was coveredwith blood. " The little maidservant had a curious look, half horror, half importance, as she said this. She herself was not more than fifteenat the time. 

But sickness is commoner by far than accident, and owing to thenecessity the cottagers are under of doing everything for themselvesthey often get into dire straits. Of some of the things that go on onecannot hear with equanimity. The people are English; bone of our bone. But we shut our eyes. I have heard of well-to-do folk in the parish who, giving of their abundance to foreign missions, deny that there isdistress here at home. The most charitable explanation of that falsehoodis to suppose that across their secluded gardens and into theirluxurious rooms, or even to their back-doors, an average Englishcottager is too proud to go. Yet it is hard to understand how all signsof what is so constantly happening can be shut out. For myself, I havenever gone out of my way to look for what I see. I have never invitedconfidences. The facts that come to my knowledge seem to be merely thecommonplaces of the village life. If examples of the people's troubleswere wanted, they could be provided almost endlessly, and in almostendless diversity. But there is one feature that never varies. Yearafter year it is still the same tale; all the extra toil, all thediscomfort, or horror, or difficulty, of dealing with sickness fallsimmediately on the persons of the family where the sickness occurs; andit sets its cruel mark upon them, so that the signs can be seen as onegoes about, in the faces of people one does not know. And the womensuffer most. 

One winter evening a woman came to my door to see if she could borrow abed-rest. Her sister, she said, had been ill with pleurisy andbronchitis for a week or more, and for the last two days had beenspitting a great deal of blood. The woman looked very poor; she mighthave been judged needlessly shabby. A needle and thread would so soonhave remedied sundry defects in her jacket, which was gaping open at theseams. But her face suggested that there were excuses for her. 

I have never forgotten her face, as it showed that evening, although Ihave since seen it looking happier. It was dull of colour--the face ofan overworked and over-burdened soul; and it had a sullen expression ofhelplessness and resentment. The eyes were weary and pale--I fanciedthat trouble had faded the colour out of them. But with all this I gotan impression of something dogged and unbeaten in the woman's temper. She went away with the bed-rest, apologizing for coming to borrow it. "'Tis so bad"--those were her words--"'tis so bad to see 'em layin'there like that, sufferin' so much pain. "

I had never seen her before--for it was years ago; and, knowing nobetter then, I supposed her to be between forty and fifty years old. Inreality, she can hardly have been thirty. It was the stress of personalservice that had marred her so young. Did her jacket need mending? As Ihave since learnt, at that period the youngest of her family was unborn, and the oldest cannot have been more than eight or nine. Besides nursingher sister, therefore, she had several children to wait upon, as well asher husband--a man often ailing in health. For all I know she was eventhen, as certainly she has been since, obliged to go out working formoney, so as to keep the family going; and, seeing that she was amother, it is probable that she herself had already known the extremityof hardship. 

Because, as scarcely needs saying, the principle of self-help isstrained to the uttermost at time of child-birth. Then, the othermembers of the family have to shift for themselves as best they can, with what little aid neighbours can find time to give; and where thereare young children in the cottage, it is much if they are sufficientlyfed and washed. But it is the situation of the mother herself that mostneeds to be considered. Let me give an illustration of how she fares. 

Several years ago there was a birth in a cottage very near to me. Only afew hours before it happened the woman had walked into the town to doher shopping for herself and carry home her purchases. As soon as thebirth was known, a younger sister, out at service, got a week's holiday, so that she might be at hand to help, though there was no spare room inthe cottage where she could sleep. During that week, also, the parishnurse came in daily, until more urgent cases occupied all her time. After that the young mother was left to her own resources. According tosomeone I know, who looked in from time to time, she lay in bed with hernew-born baby, utterly alone in the cottage, her husband being away atwork all day for twelve hours, while the elder children were at school. She made no complaint, however, of being lonely; she thought thesolitude good for her. But she was worried by thinking of the fire inthe next room--the living-room, which had the only fireplace in thehouse, there being none in her bedroom--lest it should set fire to thecottage while she lay helpless. It seems that the hearth was so narrowand the grate so high that coals were a little apt to fall out on to thefloor. Once, she said, there had almost been "a flare-up. " It was whenshe was still getting about, and she had gone no farther away than intoher garden to feed the fowls; but in that interval a coal fell beyondthe fender, and she, returning, found the place full of smoke and theold hearthrug afire. The dread that this might happen again distressedher now as she lay alone, unable to move. 

I could furnish more pitiful tales than this, if need were--tales ofwomen in child-bed tormented with anxiety because their husbands are outof work, and there is no money in the cottage, and no prospect of any;or harassed by the distress of little children who miss the help whichthe mother cannot give, and so on. But this case illustrates the normalsituation. Here there was no actual destitution, nor any fear of it, andthe other children were being cared for. The husband was earning a pounda week at constant work, and the circumstances of the family were on thewhole quite prosperous. But one of the conditions of prosperity was thatthe father of the family should be away all day, leaving the mother andinfant unattended. 

From whatever sickness the woman suffers, there is always the samepiteous story to be told--she is destitute of help. The household drudgeherself, she has no drudges to wait upon her. The other day I was toldof a woman suffering from pleurisy. Her husband had left home at sixo'clock for his work; a neighbour-woman came in to put on a poultice andmake things comfortable; then she, too, had to go to her work. In theafternoon a visitor, looking in by chance, found that the sick womanhad been alone for five hours; she was parched with thirst, and herpoultice had gone cold. For yet one more example. I mentioned just now aman who was killed on the railway. His widow, quite a young woman then, reared her three or four children, earning some eight or nine shillingsa week at charing or washing for people in the town; and still she keepsherself, pluckily industrious. There is one son living with her--anerrand-boy--and there are two daughters both in service at a large newhouse in the village. During last spring the woman had influenza, andhad to take to her bed, her girls being permitted to take turns incoming home to care for her. Just as she, fortunately, began to recover, this permission was withdrawn: both girls were wanted in "their place, "because a young lady there had taken influenza. So they had to forsaketheir mother. But by-and-by one of these girls took the infection. Her"place, " then, was thought to be--at home. She was sent back promptly toher mother, and it was not long before the mother herself broke downagain, not being yet strong enough to do sick-nursing in addition to herdaily work. 

It must be borne in mind that these acute and definite troubles springup from the surface of an ill-defined but chronic anxiety, from whichvery few of the cottagers are free for any length of time. For thoughthere is not much extreme destitution, a large number of the villagerslive always on the brink of it; they have the fear of it always insight. In a later chapter I shall give some particulars as to their waysand means; in this, I only wish it to be remembered that the question ofways and means is a life-and-death one for the labourer and his wife, and leaves them little peace and little hope of it. During the tradedepression which culminated in 1908-09 I was frequently made aware ofthe disquiet of their minds by the scraps of talk which reached me as Ipassed along the road, and were not meant for my hearing. From women whowere comparing notes with one another, this was the sort of thing onewould hear: "'En't had nothin' to do this six weeks; and don't sim nolikelihoods of it. " "I s'pose we shall get through, somehow. " "I'm sureI dunno what 'tis a-comin' to. " "'Tis bad 'nough now, in the summer;what it'll be like in the winter, Gawd only knows. " Again and again Iheard talk like this. 

And all this was only an accentuation or a slight increase in volume ofa note of apprehension which in better times still runs less audibly asa kind of undertone to the people's thought. I had stopped one day tosay good-morning to an old widow-woman outside her cottage. She was themother of that young man whose funeral was mentioned two chapters back;but this was before his death, and while, in fact, he was still doing alittle occasional work. She spoke cheerfully, smiled even, until somechance word of mine (I have forgotten what it was) went through thearmour of her fortitude, and she began to cry. Then she told me of theposition she was in, and the hopelessness of it, and her determinationto hold out. Some charitable lady had called upon her. "Mrs. Curtis, "the lady had said, "if ever you are ill, I hope you'll be sure and sendto _me_. " And Mrs. Curtis had replied: "Well, ma'am, if ever I sends, you may be sure I _am_ ill. " "But, " she added, "they don't understand. 'Tis when you're on yer feet that help's wanted--not wait till 'tis toolate. " With regard to her present circumstances--she "didn't mind sayingit to me--sometimes she didn't hardly know how they was goin' on, " forshe hadn't a penny except what her son could earn. And "people seemed tothink it didn't matter for a single chap to be out o' work. They didn'tthink he might have a mother to keep, or, if he was in lodgin's, hecouldn't live there for nothin'. .. . Sometimes we seems to be gettin' ona little, and then you has bad luck, and there you are again where youwas before. It's like gettin' part way up a hill and fallin' down to thebottom again, and you got it all to begin over again. "

I said something--some platitude--turning to go away. Then she managedto smile--a shining-eyed smile--saying: "Well, 'tis only for life. If'twas for longer than that I don't know if we should hardly be able tobear it. "

This was but one old woman. Yet, if you have an ear for a folk-saying, you will recognize one there in that "only for life" of hers. Be surethat a by-word so compact as that was not one old woman's invention. Toacquire such brevity and smoothness, it must have been wandering aboutthe parish for years; and when it reached me at last it had beenpolished by the despair of hundreds of other people, as a coin ispolished by passing through hundreds of hands. 

V

DRINK

It will be understood, from what was said on the subject in the firstchapter, that the village population has its rough element, and thatdrunkenness, or at any rate excessive drinking, is very common. It istrue that there are very few habitual drunkards in the parish--there arenot even many men, perhaps, who frequently take too much; but, on theother hand, the majority are beer-drinkers, and every now and then oneor another of them, normally sober, oversteps the limit. Thus, possiblyevery other family has had its passing experience of what drunkennessmeans in the temporary lapse of father, or son, or brother. A rainy BankHoliday invariably leads to much mischief in this way, and so does asudden coming of hot weather in the summer. The men have too much to doto spare time for the public-house in the ordinary weekdays, but onSaturday and Sunday nights, when the strain is relaxed, they are apt togive way too far. 

The evils of drunkenness, however, are well enough known, and I do notpropose to dwell on that side of the matter. But there is anotheraspect of it which must be considered, if only because it is sothoroughly characteristic of the old village outlook. Incidentally, thisother aspect may be worth a little attention from temperance reformers. 

For the truth is that the average villager's attitude towards drink andtemperance is not that of an unrepentant or rebellious sinner; rather, it is the attitude of a man who has sound reasons for adhering to hisown point of view. If he grows restive under the admonitions of thepharisaical, if he meets them defiantly, or if he merely laughs, asoften as not it is because he feels that his mentors do not understandthe situation so well as he does. How should they, who see it whollyfrom the outside--they who never go near the public-house; they who haveno experience either of poverty or of hard work--how should they, whospeak from prejudice, be entitled to dictate to him, who has knowledge?He resents the interference, considers it insulting, and goes his ownway, supported by a village opinion which is entirely on his side, andcertainly has its claims to respect. It is this village opinion which Iwish to examine now. 

In the eyes of the older villagers or of the more old-fashioned onesmere occasional drunkenness is a very venial fault. The people make adistinction between the habitual drunkard and him who occasionallydrinks too much, and they are without compassion for the former. He is a"low blackguard"; they look reproachfully if you talk of trying to helphim by giving him a job of work, or at any rate they pity your wastedefforts. But for the occasional defaulter they have a friendly feeling, unless, of course, he turns savage in his cups. As long as he ischeerful he is rather a figure of fun to them than anything, or he is anobject of wondering interest. On a certain August Bank Holiday I saw oneof our villagers staggering up the hill--a middle-aged man, far gone indrink, so that all the road was none too wide for him. Other wayfarersaccompanied and observed him with a philosophically detached air, andbetween whiles a woman grabbed at his coat between the shoulders, tryingto steady him. But by and by, lurching free, he wobbled across the roadto within an inch of a perambulator with two children which another manwas pushing. The drunken man leant over it, poised like an impendingfate, and so hung for a few seconds before he staggered away, and itmight be supposed that at least the man with the perambulator would beindignant. But not he. He merely remarked wonderingly: "You wouldn't ha'thought it possible he could ha' done it, would ye?" The other wayfarerslaughed lightly, amongst them a young married woman with a refined face. 

While the comic side of a man in drink makes its strong appeal to thevillage folk, they are ready to see excuses for him, too. Anybody, theyargue, is liable to be overtaken before he knows, and where is the greatdisgrace in an accident that may befall themselves, or me, or you?There is at least no superiority in their outlook, no pharisaism. Listen, for proof of it, to a talk of Bettesworth's about a neighbourwho had been working with the "ballast-train" on the railway all night. "You, " he began--and this first word showed how innocent he was of shamein his own attitude, since he supposed that I must share hisamusement--"you'd ha' laughed if you'd ha' sin Isaac yest'day. He wasgot fair boozed; an' comin' up the gully, thinkin' he was goin' straightfor 'ome, he run his head right into they bushes down by ol' DameSmith's. Then he got up the slope about a dozen yards, an' begun to goback'ards 'till he come to Dame Smith's wall, and that turn'd 'n, and hebegun to go back'ards again down the gully. I did laugh. He bin at workall night on the ballast-train, an' come back reg'lar fagged out, an'hadn't had no vittles--an' a feller _wants_ something--and then the fustglass he has do's for 'n. He bin workin' every night for a week, an'Sundays, too. And Alice" ("Alice" is Isaac's wife) "is away hop-tyin'all day, so, of course, Isaac didn't care 'bout goin' 'ome to lop aboutthere by hisself. .. . I've seed a many go like that. They works allnight, an' gets reg'lar fagged out, an' then the fust drop does 'em. When Alice come 'ome, she looked at least to find the kettle boilin'. 'Stead o' that, she couldn't git in. At least, she had to fetch the keyfrom where she put 'n when she went away in the mornin'. I laughed ather when I went down 'ome. 'Where is he now?' I says. 'Ah, you maylaugh, ' she says, 'but I got to rouse 'n up about ten o'clock an' git 'na cup o' tea. He got to be at work again at eleven. ' That's how theydo's. Begins about ten or eleven o'clock, and don't leave off againafore six or seven, or p'raps nine or ten, next mornin'. Makes days an'quarters for three an' ninepence. I've knowed a many like that come 'omean' git boozed fust glass, like old Isaac. I did laugh, though, and sodid Dame Smith when she was a-tellin' of me. "

Inheriting from their forefathers such an unimaginative point of view, most of the cottage folk have been, until quite lately, far fromregarding the public-house as a public nuisance. It had a distinct valuein their scheme of living. That fact was demonstrated plainly in anoutburst of popular feeling some years ago. The licensing magistrates ofthe neighbourhood had taken the extreme, and at that time unprecedented, course of refusing to renew the licenses of several houses in the town. But while the example they had thus set was winning them applause all upand down England, they were the objects, in this and the adjacentvillages, of all sorts of vituperation on account of what the cottagersconsidered a wanton insult to their class. It must be admitted that theaction of the justices had some appearance of being directed againstthe poor. Nobody could deny, for instance, that the houses frequented bymiddle-class clients, and responsible for a good deal of middle-classdrinking, were all passed over, and that those singled out forextinction served only the humblest and least influential. My neighboursentertained no doubts upon the matter. They were not personallyconcerned--at any rate, the public-houses in this village were left openfor them to go to--but the appearance of favouritism offended them. Theywere as sure as if it had been officially proclaimed that the intentionwas to impose respectability upon them against their will; theirpleasures were to be curtailed to please fanatics who understood nothingand cared less about the circumstances of cottage folk. So, during someweeks the angry talk went round the village; it was not difficult toknow what the people were thinking. They picked to pieces the characterof the individual magistrates, planning ineffective revenge. "That oldSo-and-So" (Chairman of the Urban Council)--"they'd bin to his shop alltheir lives, but he'd find he'd took his last shillin' from 'em now! Andthat What's-his-Name--the workin' classes had voted for 'n at lastCounty Council election, and this was how he served 'em! He needn'ttrouble to put up again, when his turn was up!" Then they commiseratedthe suffering publicans. "Look at poor old Mrs. ----, what kept the housedown Which Street--always a most well-conducted house. Nobody couldn'tfind no fault with it, and 'twas her livin'! Why should she have herlivin' took away like that, poor old gal?. .. They sims to think nobodyen't right 'xcep' jest theirselves--as if we poor people could live an'go on same as they do. They can 'ave their drink at 'ome, and theirmusic, but where be we to go to if they shuts up the 'ouses?" Such werethe remarks I heard over and over again. It seemed to the poor thatthere were to be no more cakes and ale, because Malvolio was virtuous, or because their own manners were not refined enough. 

In the light of subsequent political events I am prepared to believethat some of this popular indignation was engineered from thepublic-houses. But I do not think it required much engineering. Itsounded spontaneous at the time, and considering how the villagers areplaced, their resentment was not unnatural. As I have said, thepublic-house has its value in their scheme of living. They have no meansof enjoying themselves at home, no room in their cottages forentertaining friends, and they may well ask what they are to do if thepublic-houses are closed to them. 

One thing, at least, is sure. If the ordinary village inn were nothingbut the foul drink-shop which its enemies allege, if all that itprovided was an irresistible temptation to depravity, the majority ofthe people who resort to it now would very soon leave it alone. And thesame is true of the little lowly places in the town. In the thirdchapter I mentioned how the village women, with their men-folk andtheir children, too--until the recent Act of Parliament shut thechildren out--would make a Saturday-night call at some public-housebefore going home from the weekly shopping expedition. But these are thereverse of bad women. They are honest and self-respecting mothers offamilies; women obviously innocent of anything approaching intemperance. I have seen them chatting outside a public-house door, and thensmilingly pushing it open and going in, as happily unconscious of evilas if they were going to a mothers' meeting. They see no harm in it. They are away from home, they have far to go, and they want refreshment. But it is perfectly certain that most of them would rather drop thanenter such places--for they are not afraid of fatigue--if there wererisk of anything really wrong within. The labouring-class woman, asalready explained, takes no hurt from a frank style of talk. She is notsqueamish, but she has a very strong sense of her own honour; and if youremember how keen is the village appetite for scandal, you will perceivethat there can be no fear of scandal attaching to her because of a visitto a public-house, or she would not go there. It should be noted, asevidence of a strict public opinion regulating the custom, that thesesame women seldom enter the public-houses in the village, and never anyothers save on this one occasion. They require the justification oftheir weekly outing, when supper is delayed, and the burden of livingcan be forgotten amongst friends for an hour. At other times they wouldconsider the indulgence disgraceful; and though they enjoy it just atthese times, I do not remember that I have ever seen one of them showingthe least sign of having carried her enjoyment too far. 

The men certainly are governed by no such severe public opinion, but arefree to "get a drink" at any time without being thought the worse of bytheir neighbours; yet they, too, for the most part, are of good andsober character enough to prove that the village public-house cannot beso utterly given up to evil as might be supposed from the horrified talkof refined people. Not many men in this parish would tolerate a place inwhich they could do nothing but get drunk. It is for something else thatthey go to the Fox or the Happy Home. The drinking is but a pleasantincident. They despise the fellow who merely goes in to have hisunsociable glass and be off again, as heartily as they dislike thehabitual soaker who brings their entertainment into disfavour; and theythemselves keep a rough sort of order--or they increase disorder intrying to quell it--rather than that the landlord should interfere. Thatloud harsh talk which one hears as one passes the public-house of anevening is not what the hyper-sensitive suppose. It does not betokendrunkenness so much as uncouth manners--the manners of neglected menwho spend their lives at severe physical labour, and want a littlerelaxation in the evening. So far as I have seen, the usual conversationin the taproom of a country public-house is a lazy and innocentinterchange of remarks, which wander aimlessly from one subject toanother, because nobody wants to bother his head with thinking; or elseit is a vehement discussion, in which dogmatic assertion does duty forargument and loudness for force. In either case it rests and stimulatesthe tired men, while the drink refreshes their throats, and it has nomore necessary impropriety than the drawing-room talk of the well-to-do. In this intercourse men who do not read the papers get an inkling of thenews of the day, those who have no books come into contact with otherminds, opinions are aired, the human craving for fun gets a littleexercise; and for topics of talk, instead of those which occupy moneyedpeople, who know about the theatre or the Church, or foreign travel, orgolf, or the state of the poor, or the depreciation of Consols, thelabourers have their gardens, and the harvest, and the horses theydrive. They talk about their employers, and their work, and their wages;they dispute about county cricket or exchange notes about blight, or newbuildings, or the latest public sensation; and all this in endlessdetail, endlessly interesting to them. So, utterly unaided by arts orany contrivances for amusement, they make entertainment for themselves. That they must make it in kindly temper, too, is obvious; for who wouldtake part in it to be usually annoyed? And it may well be conceived thatin an existence so empty of other pleasures, the pleasures to be derivedfrom company are held precious. The scheme of living would be verydesolate without that consolation, would grow very illiberal and sombre. But the public-houses at least do something to prevent this, and inclinging to them the villagers have clung to something which they needand cannot get elsewhere. It is idle to pretend that the "Institute"which was started a few years ago provides a satisfactory alternative. Controlled by people of another class, whose "respectability" isirksome, and open only to members and never to women, the Institute doesnot lend itself to the easy intercourse which tired men enjoy at thepublic-house. Its billiard-table is not for their heavy hands, used tothe pick-axe and shovel; its card games interrupt their talk; itsnewspapers remind them that they cannot read very well, and suggest amode of life which they are unable to share. 

These reasons, I believe, prevail to keep the labouring men frompatronizing the Institute more even than does its strictly teetotalpolicy. Or perhaps I should say, rather, that while they dislike goingwithout their beer, they object more strongly still to the principle onwhich it is forbidden in the Institute. For that principle is nothingmore or less than a tacit arraignment of their own point of view. Itimputes evil propensities to them; it directly challenges the truth ofan idea which not only have they never doubted, but which their ownexperience seems to them to confirm. The day-labourer really knowsnothing to take the place of beer. A man who has been shovelling in agravel-pit, or carrying bricks up a ladder, or hoeing in the fields, orcarting coal, for ten hours in the day, and has, perhaps, walked six orseven miles to do it, acquires a form of thirst which no other drink hecan buy will touch so coolly. Of alternatives, milk fails utterly;"minerals" are worse than unsatisfactory; tea, to serve the purpose atall, must be taken very hot, and then it produces uncomfortable sweat, besides involving the expense of a fire for its preparation. Thereremains cold water. But cold water in copious draughts has itsdrawbacks, even if it can be obtained, and that is assuming too much. Inthis parish, at any rate, good water was, until quite lately, a scarcecommodity, and nobody cared to drink the stagnant stuff out of the tanksor water-butts which supplied most of the cottages. In short, prudenceitself has seemed to recommend beer as the one drink for tired men. Intheir view it is the safest, and the most easily obtained, and, whenobtained, it affords the most refreshment. Thus much their ownexperience has taught the villagers. 

And they have the tradition of long generations to support them in theirtaste. As far back as they can remember, the strongest and ablest men, whose virtues they still recall and admire, renewed their strength withbeer daily. Not labourers alone, but farmers and other employers too, whose health and prosperity were a sufficient justification of theirhabits, were wont to begin their morning with a glass of beer, whichthey took, not as a stimulant, but as a food; and the belief in it as afood was so convinced that a man denied his beer by doctor's orders washardly to be persuaded that he was not being starved of due nourishment. Such was the esteem in which beer was held twenty years ago, nor has thebelief been uprooted yet. Indeed, an opinion so sanctioned to a man, bythe approval of his own father and grandfather and all the worthies hecan remember, does not immediately become false to him just because itis condemned by strangers who do not know him, and who, with all theirtemperance, seem to him a delicate and feeble folk. He prefers his ownstandard of good and evil, and in sitting down to his glass he has nodoubt that he is following a sensible old fashion, modestly trying tobe, not a fine gentleman, but a sturdy Englishman. 

On much the same principle the public-house as a place of resort isjustified to the villager. I have already shown how it serves him forentertainment instead of newspaper, or book, or theatre; and here, again, he has a long-standing country tradition to support him. In spiteof reformers on the one hand, and on the other hand that tendency of"the trade, " which is spoiling the public-house as a place ofcomfortable rest by frowning upon customers who stay too long and drinktoo little--in spite of these discouragements, the villagers stillcannot believe that what was good enough for their fathers is not goodenough for themselves. It might not be equally good if they wished to be"superior persons, " but for the modest needs of people like themselvesthey think it should serve. So they go to the public-house just as theirfathers did, content to miss the approval of the cultured, so long asthey can do as well as those worthies. Of course, if they ever analyzedtheir impressions, they must often go home discerning that they had beendisappointed; that the company had been dull and the comfort small; thatthey had got less conviviality than they wanted, and more of the drinkthat should have been only its excuse; but as they are neverintrospective, so the disappointment goes unnoticed, and leads to nodisillusionment. 

VI

WAYS AND MEANS

Before going farther I must try to give some account of the ways andmeans of the villagers, although, obviously, in a population soheterogeneous, nothing short of a scientific survey on the lines pursuedby Sir Charles Booth or Mr. Rowntree could be of much value in thisdirection. The observations to be offered here pretend to no suchauthority. They have been collected at random, and subjected to notests, and they refer almost exclusively to the "unskilled" labouringpeople. 

During twenty years there have not been many fluctuations in the priceof a day's labour in the parish, but probably on the whole there hasbeen a slight increase. The increase, however, is very uncertain. Whilethe South African War was in progress, and afterwards when Bordon Campwas building, eight miles away, labour did indeed seem to profit. Butthen came the inevitable trade depression, work grew scarce, and by thesummer of 1909 wages had dropped to something less than they had beenbefore the war. I heard, for instance, of a man--one of the most capablein the district--who was glad that summer to go haymaking at half acrown a day. And yet two or three years earlier he had certainly beenearning from fourpence halfpenny to fivepence an hour, or, say, fromthree and sixpence to four shillings for a day's work. In 1909 thelow-water mark was reached; the following spring saw a slight revival, and at present the average may be put at three shillings. For this sum afairly good man can be got to do an ordinary day's work of nine hours inthe vegetable-garden or at any odd job. 

The builders' labourers are rather better paid--if their employment werenot so intermittent--with an average of from fourpence halfpenny tofivepence an hour. Carters, too, and vanmen employed by coal-merchants, builders, and other tradesmen in the town, are comparatively well offwith constant work at eighteen or twenty shillings a week. The men inthe gravel-pits--but that industry is rapidly declining as one afteranother the pits are worked out--can earn perhaps five shillings a dayif at piece-work, or about three and sixpence on ordinary terms. Fromthis sum a deduction must be made for tools, which the men provide andkeep in repair themselves. It is rather a heavy item. The picksfrequently need repointing, and a blacksmith can hardly do this for lessthan twopence the point. The gravel-work, too, is very irregular. Insnow or heavy rain it has to stop, and in frost it is difficult. Morethan once during the winter of 1908-09, it being a time of greatdistress, gravel-pit workers came to me with some of those workedflints--the big paleoliths of the river-gravel--which they had found andsaved up, but now desired to sell, in order to raise money for pointingtheir pickaxes. I have wondered sometimes if the savages who shapedthose flints had ever looked out upon life so anxiously as theseneighbours of mine, whose iron tools were so strangely receiving thisprehistoric help. 

At one time upwards of forty men in the parish had more or loss constantwork on one of the "ballast-trains" which the South-Western Railway kepton the line for repairing the permanent way. The work, usually done atnight and on Sundays, brought them in from eighteen to twenty-fourshillings a week, according to the hours they made. I do not know howmany of our men are employed on the railway now, but they are certainlyfewer. Some years ago--it was when the great trade depression hadalready hit the parish badly, and dozens of men were out of workhere--the railway-company suddenly stopped this train, and consternationspread through the village at the prospect of forty more being added tothe numbers of its unemployed. 

Reviewing the figures, and making allowance for short time due to badweather, public holidays, sickness, and so on, it may be estimated thateven when trade is good the average weekly wage earned by one of thevillage men at his recognized work is something under seventeenshillings. This, however, does not constitute quite the whole income ofthe family. In most cases the man's wages are supplemented by small anduncertain sums derived from the work of women and children, and from oddjobs done in the evenings, and from extra earnings in particularseasons. 

Field-work still employs a few women, although every year their numbersdecrease. It is miserably paid at a shilling a day, or in some cases onpiece-work terms which hardly work out at a higher figure. Piecework, for instance, was customary in the hop-gardens (now rapidlydisappearing), where the women cut the bines and "tied" or "trained" thehops at so much per acre, providing their own rushes for the tying. Athaymaking and at harvesting there is work for women; and again in thehop-gardens, when the picking is over, women are useful at clearing upthe bines. They can earn money, too, at trimming swedes, picking upnewly-dug potatoes, and so on; but when all is said, there are not manyof them who can find work to do in the fields all the year round. At thebest, bad weather often interrupts them, and the stress and hardships ofthe work, not to mention other drawbacks, make the small earnings fromit a doubtful blessing. 

A considerable number of women formerly eked out the family income bytaking in washing for people in the town. Several properly equippedlaundries have of late years greatly reduced this employment, but itstill occupies a few. The difficulties of carrying it on areconsiderable, apart from the discomforts of it in a small cottage. Unless a woman has a donkey and cart, it is hard for her to get thewashing from her customers' homes and carry it back again. Of the amountthat can be earned at the work by a married woman, with husband andchildren to do for, I have no knowledge. 

Charwomen, more in demand than ever as the residential character of theplace grows more pronounced, earn latterly as much as two shillings aday, besides at least one substantial meal. The meal is a consideration, and obviously good for the women. In bad times, when the men and eventhe children go rather hungry, it often happens that the mother of thefamily is able to keep her strength up, thanks to the tolerable food shegets three or four days a week in the houses where she goes scrubbingand cleaning. 

A few women--so few that they really need not be mentioned--earn alittle at needlework, two or three of them having a small dressmakingconnection amongst their cottage neighbours and with servant-girls. Itwill be realized that the prices which such clients can afford to payare pitifully small. 

In one or other of these ways most of the labouring class women dosomething to add to the earnings of their husbands, so that inprosperous times the family income may approach twenty-four shillings aweek. Yet the average must be below that sum. The woman's work is veryirregular, and just when her few shillings would be mostuseful--namely, when she has a baby or little children to care for--ofcourse her employment stops. If not, it is unprofitable in the end; for, involving as it does some neglect of the children, as well as of thewoman's own health, it leads to sickness and expenses which mayimpoverish the whole family for years. 

With regard to the minor sources of income, I have often wondered at theeagerness of the average labourer to earn an odd shilling, and at theamount of work he will do for it, after his proper day's work is over. Iknow several men who frequently add two or three shillings to theirweek's money in this way. To give an instance of how they go on, oneevening recently I was unexpectedly wanting to send a heavy parcel intothe town. Going out to seek somebody who would take it, I chanced upon aman--very well known to me--who was at work just within the hedge of avilla garden, where he was erecting on a pole a notice-board announcinga "sale of work" shortly to be held. He had obviously nearly done, so Iproposed my errand to him. Yes; he would go as soon as he had finishedwhat he was doing. Then, perceiving that he looked tired, I commented onthe fact. He smiled. "I bin mowin' all day over there at . .. , " and hementioned a farm two or three miles distant. Still, he could go with myparcel. This was at about seven o'clock in the evening, and would mean atwo-mile walk for him. The very next evening, when it was raining, Isaw him in the churchyard digging a grave. "Haven't been mowing to-day, have you?" "Yes, " he said cheerily. Mowing is, perhaps, the mostfatiguing work a man can do, but fatigue was nothing to this man where afew shillings could be earned. His ordinary wages, I believe, areeighteen shillings a week, but during last winter he was out of work forsix or eight weeks. 

I have known this man, and others also, to make now and then quite alittle harvest, amounting to several pounds, at the unsavoury work ofcleaning out cess-pits. One man, indeed--a farm-labourer by day--had fora time a sort of trade connection in the parish for this employment, andwould add the labour of two or three nights a week to that of his days;but, of course, he could not keep it up for long. It is highly-paidwork, as it ought to be; but the ten shillings or so that a man may earnat it four or five times a year come rather as a welcome windfall thanas a part of income upon which he can rely. 

The seasonal employments are disappearing from the neighbourhood, asagriculture gives place to the residential interests. Hop-picking usedto be the most notable of them, and even now, spite of themuch-diminished acreage under hops, it is found necessary at the schoolsto defer the long holiday until September, because it would beimpossible to get the children to school while the hops are beingpicked. For all the family goes into the gardens--all, that is to say, who have no constant work. The season now lasts some three weeks, duringwhich a family may earn anything from two to four pounds. At this seasona few of the more experienced and trustworthy men--my friend who mows, and digs graves, and runs errands is one of them--do better in thehop-kilns at "drying" than in the gardens. Theirs is an anxious, aresponsible, and almost a sleepless duty. The pay for it, when I lastheard, was two guineas a week, and--pleasant survival from an older modeof employment--the prudent hop-grower gives his dryers a pound atChristmas as a sort of retaining-fee. It is to be observed that failureof the crop is too frequent an occurrence. In years when there are nohops, the people feel the want of their extra money all the followingwinter. 

Another custom, as it is all but extinct, needs only a passing mentionnow. No longer do large gangs of our labourers--with some of theirwomenfolk, perhaps--troop off "down into Sussex" for the Augustharvesting there, and for the hoeing that follows it; and no longer isthe village enriched by the gold they used to bring back. When July isending, perhaps two or three men, whether enticed by some dream of oldharvesting joys in sight of the sea, or driven by want at home, maystray off for a few weeks; but I do not hear that their adventure isever so prosperous nowadays as to induce others to follow suit. 

Where the income of a family from the united efforts of the father andmother is still so small, every shilling that can be added to it isprecious, and, consequently, the children have to begin earning as earlyas they may. Hence there is not much lingering at school, after theminimum age for leaving has been reached. Nay, some little boys, andhere and there a little girl, will make from a shilling to half a crowna week at carrying out milk or newspapers before morning school begins, so that they go to their lessons with the first freshness taken off themby three or four miles of burdened walking. In view of the wear and tearof shoe-leather, even those parents who countenance the practice aredoubtful of its economy. Still, a few of them encourage it; and though, if spread out amongst the families, these pitiful little earnings couldhardly make a perceptible difference to the average income. I mentionthem here in order to leave no source of income unnoticed. Whenschool-days are over, the family begins to benefit from the children'swork. At fourteen years old, few of the boys are put to trades, but mostof them get something to do in the town, where there is a great demandfor errand-boys. Their wages start at about four shillings a week, increasing in a few years to as much as seven or eight. Then, atseventeen years old or so, the untrained youths begin to compete in thelabour market with the men, taking too early, and at too small wages, tothe driving of carts or even to work in the gravel-pits. The amount ofhelp that these fellows then contribute towards the family expenses outof their twelve or fourteen shillings a week depends upon the parents, but it is something if they merely keep themselves; and I believe, though I do not certainly know, that it is customary for them to pay afew shillings for their lodging at least. 

For girls leaving school there is no difficulty in finding, as they say, "a little place" for a start in domestic service; for even the cheapervillas which have sprung up around the town generally need their cheapdrudges. Hence, at an earlier age than the boys, the girls are taken offtheir parents' hands and become self-supporting. True, it is long beforethey can earn much more in money than suffices for their own needs inclothes and boots--they cannot send many shillings home to theirmothers; but no doubt a family may be found here and there enriched tothe extent of a pound or two a year by the labour of the girls. 

Putting the various items together, it might seem that in favourablecircumstances there would be some twenty-three or twenty-four shillingsa week for a family to live on all the year round. But it must beremembered, first, that the circumstances seldom remain favourable formany months together; and, second, that the greater number of familieshave to do without those small supplementary sums provided by the workof children, or by odd jobs, or by the good wages of hop-drying, and soforth. Nor is this the only deduction to be made. As I have alreadyexplained, in the cases where money is most needed--namely, where thereis a family of little children--the mother cannot go out to work, andthe income is reduced to the bare amount earned by the father alone. Andthese cases are very plentiful, while, on the contrary, those in whichthe best conditions prevail are very scarce. Taking the village allthrough, and balancing bad times against good ones, I question if theincome of the labouring class families averages twenty shillings a week;indeed, I should be greatly surprised to learn that it amounted to somuch. In very many instances eighteen shillings or even less would bethe more correct estimate. 

One other item remains to be recognized, although its value is toovariable to be computed with any exactness in money and added to the sumof an average week's income. What is the worth to a labourer of thecrops he grows in his garden? It depends, obviously, on the man's skill, and the size of the garden, and the clemency of the seasons--matters, all of them, in which any attempt at generalization must be receivedwith suspicion. All that can be said with certainty is that most of thecottages in the valley have gardens, and that most of the cottagers arediligent to cultivate them. But when the circumstances are considered, it will be plain that the value of the produce must not be put veryhigh. The amount of ground that can be worked in the spring and summerevenings is, after all, not much; it is but little manure that can bebought out of a total money-income of eighteen shillings a week; andeven good seed is, for the same reason, seldom obtained. The return forthe labour expended, therefore, is seldom equal to what it should be, and we may surmise that he is a fortunate man, or an unusuallyindustrious one, who can make his gardening worth more than twoshillings a week to him in food. There must be many cottages in thevalley where the yield of the garden is scarcely half that value. 

To complete the picture of the people's ways and means, it ought next tobe shown how the money income is spent by an average family. To do that, however, would be beyond my power, even if it were possible to determinewhat an "average family" is. I know, of course, that rent takes fromthree and sixpence a week for the poorest hovels to six shillings forthe newer tenements on the outskirts of the parish; in other words, thatfrom a quarter to a third of the labourer's whole income goes backimmediately into the pockets of the employing classes for shelter alone. I know also that payments into benefit societies drain away anothereightpence to a shilling a week. I realize that very often the weeklybread bill runs away with nearly half the money that is left, and so Ican reckon that tea and groceries, boots and clothes, firing and light, have somehow to be obtained at a cost of no more than seven or eightshillings weekly. But these calculations fail to satisfy me. They leaveunsolved the problem of those last seven or eight shillings, on theexpenditure of which turns the really vital question which an inquirylike this ought to settle. How do the people make both ends meet? Arethe seven shillings as a rule enough for so many purposes? or almost, but not quite enough? or nothing like enough? After all, I do not know. Information breaks down just at this point where information is most tobe desired. 

There is no doubt at all, however, as to the strain and stress of thegeneral struggle to live in the valley, the sheer wear and tear oftemper and spirits involved in the daily grappling with that problem. Everywhere one comes across symptoms of it--partial evidences--but themost complete exposition that I have had was given, some years ago now, by a woman who had no intention of complaining. She came to me with amessage from a neighbour who was ill, but, in explanation of her part inhelping him, she began to speak of her own affairs. With some of theseaffairs I was already acquainted. Thus I knew her to be the mother of anexceptionally large family, so that her case could not be quite typical. But I also knew that her husband had been in constant work for manyyears, so that, in her case, there had been no period when the incomeat her disposal ceased altogether, as in the case of so many other womenotherwise less handicapped than she. I was aware, too, that she herselfhelped out the family earnings by taking in washing. 

To these items of vague knowledge she added a few particulars. As toincome, I learnt that her husband--a labourer on a farm some three milesaway--earned fifteen shillings a week during the winter, and rather morein the summer months, when he was allowed to do "piece-work. " Thepiece-work had the further advantage of permitting him to begin so earlyin the day--four o'clock was his time in summer--that he usually gothome again by four in the afternoon, and was able to do better than mostmen with his garden. Amongst other things, he raised flowers for sale. He was wont to send to a well-known nursery in Norfolk for hisseeds--china-asters and stocks were his speciality--and he reared hisplants under a little glass "light" which he had made for himself out ofa few old window-sashes. His pains with these flowers were unsparing. Neighbours laughed at him (so his wife assured me, with some pride)because he went to the plants down on his hands and knees, smoking eachone with tobacco to clear it from green aphis. He also raised fifty orsixty sticks of celery every year, which sold for threepence apiece. Meanwhile he by no means neglected his main business as acottage-gardener--namely, the growing of food-crops for home use. Byrenting for five shillings a year an extra plot of ground near hiscottage, he was able to keep his large family supplied with potatoes forquite half the year. It was much to do. They wanted nearly a bushel ofpotatoes a week, the wife said; and if that was so, the man was adding, in the shape of potatoes at half a crown a bushel, the value of morethan three pounds a year to his income. No doubt he grew othervegetables too--parsnips, carrots, turnips, and some green-stuff--butthese were not mentioned. A little further help was at last coming fromthe family, the eldest daughter having begun to pay half the rent out ofher earnings as a servant-girl. 

Help certainly must have been welcome. There were two other girls inservice, and therefore off their parents' hands; but six children--theyoungest only a few months old--were still at home, dependent on whattheir father and mother could earn. Of these, the eldest was a boy nearthirteen. "I shall be glad when he's schoolin's over, " the mother said;and she had applied for a "labour certificate" which would allow him tofinish school as a "half-timer, " and to go out and earn a little money. 

Since their marriage, twenty-three years earlier, the couple hadoccupied always the came cottage, at a rental of three shillings a week. After the first twenty years--the property then changing owners--thefirst few repairs in all that long period had been undertaken. That isto say, the outside woodwork was painted; a promise was given to do upthe interior; the company's water was laid on; and--the rent was raisedto three-and-sixpence. The woman thought this a hardship; but she saidthat her husband, looking at the bright side of things, rejoiced tothink that now the water from the old tank, hitherto so precious forhousehold uses, might be spared for his flowers. 

After the rent was paid--with the daughter's help--there were aboutfourteen shillings left. But the man was an "Oddfellow, " and hissubscription was nine shillings a quarter, or eightpence halfpenny aweek. In prudence, that amount should perhaps have been put by everyweek, but apparently prudence often had to give way to pressing needs. "When the club money's due, that's when we finds it wust, " the womanremarked. "Sometimes I've said to 'n, 'I dunno how we be goin' to gitthrough the week. ' 'Oh, ' he says, 'don't you worry. We shall get to theend of 'n somehow. '"

But she did not explain, nor is it easy to conceive, how it was done. For observe, the weekly bushel of potatoes did not feed the family, evenfor half the year. "A gallon of potatoes a day, that's what it is, " shehad said; and then she had enumerated other items. "A gallon of bread aday, " was needed too, besides a gallon of flour once a week "forpuddings. " In other words, bread and flour cost upwards of six shillingsweekly. Seeing that this left but eight shillings for eight people, itis small wonder that the club-money was rarely put by, and great wonderhow the family managed at all when the club-money was wanted in a lump. It must have been that they went short that week. For instance, theywould do without puddings, and so save on flour and firing; and the manwould forego his tobacco--he had never any time to visit thepublic-house, so that there was nothing to be saved in that direction. Yet assuming all this, and assuming that the eldest daughter advanced afew extra shillings, still the situation remains baffling. On what couldthey save, out of eight shillings? Probably one or other of thechildren, or may be the mother herself, would make an old pair of bootsserve just one more week, until there was money in hand again; and thatwould go far to tide the family over. Yet the next week would then haveto be a pinched one; for, said the woman, "boots is the wust of all. Itwants a new pair for one or t'other of us purty near every week. "

So far this woman's testimony. It is corroborated by what othercottagers have told me. A man said, looking fondly at his children: "Ihas to buy a new pair o' shoes for one or other of us every week. Or ifI misses one week, then next week I wants two pair. " Others, again, havetold of spending five to six shillings a week on bread. But of the lessessential items one never hears. Even of clothes there is rarely anytalk, and of coal not often; nor yet often of meat, or groceries. I donot suggest that meat and groceries are foresworn, but it would appearthat they come second in the household expenses. They are luxuries, onlyto be obtained if and when more necessary things have been provided. With regard to firing--a little coal is made to go a long way in thelabourer's cottage; and with regard to clothes--it is doubtful ifanything new is bought, in many families, from year's end to year's end. At "rummage sales, " for a few pence, the women are now able to pick upsurprising bargains in cast-off garments, which they adapt as best theycan for their own or their children's wear. Economies like this, however, still hardly suffice to explain how the scanty resources arereally spread out. Apart from a few cases of palpable destitution, it isnot obvious that any families in the village suffer actual want; andseeing that inquiries in the school in recent winters have failed todiscover more than two or three sets of children manifestly wantingfood, one is led to conclude that acute poverty is of rare occurrencehere. On the other hand, all the calculations suggest that a majorityperhaps of the labouring folk endure a less intense but chronic poverty, in which, at some point or other every day, the provision for barephysical needs falls a little short. 

VII

GOOD TEMPER

In view of their unpromising circumstances the people as a rule aresurprisingly cheerful. It is true there are never any signs in thevalley of that almost festive temper, that glad relish of life, which, if we may believe the poets, used to characterize the English village ofold times. Tested by that standard of happiness, it is a low-spirited, mirthless, and all but silent population that we have here now. Ofpublic and exuberant enjoyment there is nothing whatever. And yet, subdued though they may be, the cottagers usually manage to keep intolerable spirits. A woman made me smile the other day. I had seen herhusband a week earlier, and found him rheumatic and despondent; but whenI inquired how he did, she conceded, with a laugh: "Yes, he had a bit o'rheumatism, but he's better now. He 'ad the 'ump then, too. " I inferredthat she regarded his dejection as quite an unnecessary thing; and thiscertainly is the customary attitude. The people are slow to admit thatthey are unhappy. At a "Penny Readings" an entertainer caused somedispleasure by a quite innocent joke in this connection. Coming throughthe village, he noticed the sign of one of the public-houses--The HappyHome--and invented a conundrum which he put from the platform: "Why wasthis a very miserable village?" But the answer, "Because it has only oneHappy Home in it, " gave considerable offence. For we are not used tothese subtleties of language, and the point was missed, a good many folkprotesting that we have "a _lot_ o' happy homes" here. 

That they should be so touchy about it is perhaps suggestive--pitifullysuggestive--of a suspicion in them that their happiness is open toquestion. None the less, the general impression conveyed by the people'smanners is that of a quiet and rather cheery humour, far indeed fromgaiety, but farther still from wretchedness. And in matters like thisone's senses are not deceived. I know that my neighbours have abundantexcuses for being down-hearted; and, as described in an earlier chapter, I sometimes overhear their complainings; but more often than not theevidence of voice-tones and stray words is reassuring rather thandispiriting. 

Notice, for instance, the women who have done their shopping in the townearly in the morning, and are coming home for a day's work. They are outof breath, and bothered with their armfuls of purchases; but nine timesout of ten their faces look hopeful; there is no sound of grievance orof worry in their talk; their smiling "Good-morning" to you provessomehow that it is not a bad morning with them. One day a woman goingto the town a little late met another already returning, loaded up withgoods. "'Ullo, Mrs. Fry, " she laughed, "you be 'bliged to be fust, then?" "Yes; but I en't bought it _all_, I thought you'd be comm', so Ileft some for you. " "That's right of ye. En't it a _nice mornin'_?""Jest what we wants! My old man was up an' in he's garden. .. . " The wordsgrow indistinguishable as you get farther away; you don't hear what the"old man" was doing so early, but the country voices sound for a longtime, comfortably tuned to the pleasantness of the day. 

This sort of thing is so common that I seldom notice it, unless it isvaried in some way that attracts attention. For instance, I could nothelp listening to a woman who was pushing her baby in a perambulatordown the hill. The baby sat facing her, as bland as a little image ofBuddha, and as unresponsive, but she was chaffing it. "Well, you _be_ afunny little gal, _ben't_ ye? Why, you be goin' back'ards into the town!Whoever heared tell o' such a thing--goin' to the town _back_'ards. You_be_ a funny little gal!" To me it was a funny little procession, with atouch of the pathetic hidden away in it somewhere; but it boreconvincing witness to happiness in at least one home in our valley. 

It is not so easy to discover, or rather to point out, the correspondingevidence in the demeanour of the men, although when one knows them oneis aware that their attitude towards life is quite as courageous as thewomen's, if not quite so playful. I confess that I rarely see them untilthey have put a day's work behind them; and they may be more lightsomewhen they start in the morning, at five o'clock or soon after it. Bethat as it may, in the evenings I find them taciturn, nonchalant ratherthan cheerful, not much disposed to be sprightly. Long-striding andungainly, they walk home; between six o'clock and seven you may be sureof seeing some of them coming up the hill from the town, alone or bytwos and threes. They speak but little; they look tired and stern; veryoften there is nothing but a twinkle in their eyes to prove to you thatthey are not morose. But in fact they are still taking life seriously;their thoughts, and hopes too, are bent on the further work they mean todo when they shall have had their tea. For the more old-fashioned menallow themselves but little rest, and in many a cottage garden of anevening you may see the father of the family soberly at work, and likingit too. If his wife is able to come and look on and chatter to him, orif he can hear her laughing with a friend in the next garden, so muchthe better; but he does not stop work. Impelled, as I shall show later, by other reasons besides those of economy, many of the men makeprodigiously long days of it, at least during the summer months. I haveknown them to leave home at five or even four in the morning, walk fiveor six miles, do a day's work, walk back in the evening so as to reachhome at six or seven o'clock, and then, after a meal, go on again intheir gardens until eight or nine. They seem to be under some spiritualneed to keep going; their conscience enslaves them. So they grow thinand gaunt in body, grave and very quiet in their spirits. But sullenthey very rarely are. With rheumatism and "the 'ump" combined a man willsometimes grow exasperated and be heard to speak irritably, but usuallyit is a very amiable "Good-evening" that greets you from across thehedge where one of these men is silently digging or hoeing. 

The nature of their work, shall I say, tends to bring them to quietnessof soul? I hesitate to say it, because, though work upon the ground withspade or hoe has such a soothing influence upon the amateur, there is adifference between doing it for pleasure during a spare hour and doingit as a duty after a twelve hours' day, and without any prospect ofholiday as long as one lives. Nevertheless it is plain to be seen that, albeit their long days too often reduce them to a state of apathy, thesequiet and patient men experience no less often a compensating delight inthe friendly feeling of the tool responding to their skill, and in thefine freshness of the soil as they work it, and in the solace, so variedand so unfailingly fresh, of the open air. Thus much at least I haveseen in their looks, and have heard in their speech. On a certain Juneevening when it had set in wet, five large-limbed men, just off theirwork on the railway, came striding past me up the hill. They had sacksover their shoulders; their clothes and boots, from working in gravelall day, were of the same yellowish-brown colour as the sacks; they weregetting decidedly wet; but they looked enviably easy-going andunconcerned. As they went by me one after another, one sleepy-eyed man, comfortably smoking his pipe, vouchsafed no word or glance. But theothers, with friendly sidelong glance at me, all spoke; and their placidvoices were full of rich contentment. "Good-night"; "Nice _rain_";"G'd-evenin'"; and, last of all, "_This_'ll make the young taters grow!"The man who said this looked all alert, as if the blood were dancing inhim with enjoyment of the rain; his eyes were beaming with pleasure. Sothe five passed up the hill homewards, to have some supper, and then, perhaps, watch and listen to the rain on their gardens until it was timeto go to bed. 

I ought to mention, though I may hardly illustrate, one faculty which isa great support to many of the men--I mean the masculine gift of"humour. " Not playful-witted like the women, nor yet apt, like thewomen, to refresh their spirits in the indulgence of sentiment andemotion, but rather stolid and inclined to dim brooding thought, theyare able to see the laughable side of their own misadventures anddiscomforts; and thanks to this they keep a sense of proportion, asthough perceiving that if their labour accomplishes its end, it does notreally matter that they get tired, or dirty, or wet through in doingit. This is a social gift, of small avail to the men working alone intheir gardens; but it serves them well during the day's work with theirmates, or when two or three of them together tackle some job of theirown, such as cleaning out a well, or putting up a fowl-house. Then, ifsomebody gets splashed, or knocks his knuckles, and softly swears, hiswrath turns to a grin as the little dry chuckle or the sly remark fromthe others reminds him that his feelings are understood. It is wellworth while to be present at these times. I laugh now to think of someof them that I have enjoyed; but I will not risk almost certain failurein trying to describe them, for their flavour depends on minute detailsinto which I have no space to enter. 

But whatever alleviations there may be to their troubles, the people'sgeniality is still noteworthy. In circumstances that contrast sopitifully with those of the employing classes, it would seem natural ifthey were full of bitterness and envy; yet that is by no means the case. Being born to poverty and the labouring life, they accept the positionas if it were entirely natural. Of course it has its drawbacks; but theysuppose that it takes all sorts to make a world, and since they are ofthe labouring sort they must make the best of it. With this simplephilosophy they have contrived hitherto to meet their troubles calmly, not blaming other people for them, unless in individual cases, andhardly dreaming of translating them into social injustice. They have nosense of oppression to poison their lives. The truth which economistsbegin to recognize, that where there are wealthy and idle classes theremust as an inevitable result be classes who are impoverished andoverworked, has not found its way into the villager's head. 

So, supported by an instinctive fatalism, the people have taken theirplight for granted, without harbouring resentment against the morefortunate. It may be added that most of them are convinced believers inthose fallacies which cluster around the phrase "making work. " It werestrange if they were not. The labourer lives by being employed at work;and, knowing his employer personally--this or that farmer or tradesmanor villa-resident--he sees the work he lives by actually being "made. "Only very rarely does it occur to him that when he goes to the shop he, too, makes work. In bad times, perhaps, he gets an inkling of it; andthen, when wages are scarce, and the public-house landlord grumbles, old-fashioned villagers will say, "Ah, they misses the poor man, yesee!" But the idea is too abstract to be followed to its logicalconclusion. The people do not see the multitudes at work for them inother counties, making their boots and ready-made clothes, getting theircoal, importing their cheap provisions; but they do see, and know byname, the well-to-do of the neighbourhood, who have new houses built andnew gardens laid out; and they naturally enough infer that labour wouldperish if there were no well-to-do people to be supplied. 

Against the rich man, therefore, the labourers have no sort ofanimosity. If he will spend money freely, the richer he is the better. Throughout the south of England this is the common attitude. I remember, not long ago, on a holiday, coming to a village which looked rarelyprosperous for its county, owing, I was told, to the fact that thecounty lunatic asylum near by caused money to be spent there. In thenext village, which was in a deplorable state, and had no asylum, thepeople were looking enviously towards this one, and wishing that atleast their absentee landlords would come and hunt the neighbourhood, though it appeared that one of these gentlemen was a Bishop. But thelabouring folk were not exacting as to the sort of person--lunatics, fox-hunters, Bishops--anybody would be welcome who would spend riches ina way to "make work. " And so here. This village looks up to those whocontrol wealth as if they were the sources of it; and if there is alittle dislike of some of them personally, there has so far appeared butlittle bitterness of feeling against them as a class. 

I do not say that there has never been any grumbling. One day, yearsago, an old friend of mine broke out, in his most contemptuous manner, "What d'ye think Master Dash Blank bin up to now?" He named the owner ofa large estate near the town. "Bin an' promised all his men a blanketan' a quarter of a ton o' coal at Christmas. A _blanket_, and a _quarterof a ton o' coal_! Pity as somebody hadn't shoved a brick down histhroat, when he _had_ got 'n open, so's to _keep_ 'n open!" Thesentiment sounds envious, but in fact it was scornful. It was directed, not against the great man's riches, but against the well-known meannesshe displayed anew in his contemptible gifts. 

A faint trace of traditional class animosity sounds in one or twocustomary phrases of the village, for instance in the saying that thereis one law for the rich and another for the poor. Yet this has becomesuch a by-word as to be usually stated with a smile; for is it not anold acquaintance amongst opinions? The older people even have a humorousdevelopment of it. According to their improved version, there are nottwo only, but three kinds of law: one kind for the rich, one for thepoor, and one "the law that nobody can't make. " What is this last? Why, the law "to make a feller pay what en't got nothink. " By such witticismsthe edge of bitterness is turned; the sting is taken out of that senseof inequality which, as the labourer probably knows, would poison hispresent comfort and lead him into dangerous courses if he let it rankle. With one exception, the angriest recognition of class differences whichI have come across amongst the villagers was when I passed two women ontheir way home from the town, where, I surmised, they, or some friend oftheirs, had just been fined at the County Court or the Petty Sessions. "Ah!" one was saying, with spiteful emphasis, "_there'll_ come a greatday for they to have _their_ Judge, same as we _poor_ people. " Yet eventhere, if the emotion was newly-kindled, the sentiment was tooantiquated to mean much. For it is a very ancient idea--that of gettingeven with one's enemies in the next world instead of in this. So long asthe poor can console themselves by leaving it to Providence to avengethem at the Day of Judgment, it cannot be said that there is anyvirulent class-feeling amongst them. The most that you can make of it isthat they occasionally feel spiteful. It happened, in this case, to beagainst rich people that those two women felt their momentary grudge;but it was hardly felt against the rich as a class; and if the same kindof offence had come from some neighbour, they would have said much thesame kind of thing. In the family disputes which occur now and then overthe inheritance of a few pounds' worth of property, the losers put on avery disinterested and superior look, and say piously of the gainers:"Ah, they'll never prosper! They _can't_ prosper!"

The exceptional case alluded to above was certainly startling. I wastalking to an old man whom I had long known: a little wrinkled old man, deservedly esteemed for his integrity and industry, full of experienceas well as of old-world notions sometimes a little "grumpy, " a littlecaustic in his manner of talking, but on the whole quite kindly andtolerant in his disposition. You could often watch in his face thehabitual practice of patience, as, with a wry smile and a contemptuousremark, he dismissed some disagreeable topic or other from his thoughts. He had come down in the world. His father's cottage, already mortgagedwhen he inherited it, had been sold over his head after the death of themortgagee, so that thenceforth he was on no better footing than anyother of the labourers. Gradually, as the demand failed for hisold-fashioned forms of skill--thatching, mowing, and so on--his positionbecame more and more precarious; yet he remained good-tempered, in hisqueer acid way, until he was past seventy years old. That evening, whenhe startled me, he had been telling of his day's work as a road-mender, and he was mightily philosophical over the prospect of having to give upeven that last form of regular employment, because of the exposure andthe miles of walking which it entailed. Nobody could have thought him avindictive or even a discontented man so far. By chance, however, something was said about the uncultivated land in the neighbourhood, covered as it is with fir-woods now; and at that he suddenly fired up. Pointing to the woods, which could be seen beyond the valley, he saidspitefully, while his eyes blazed: "I can remember when all that wasopen common, and you could go where you mind to. Now 'tis all fenced in, and if you looks over the fence they'll lock ye up. And they en't got nomore _right_ to it, Mr. Bourne, than you and me have! I should _like_to see they woods all go up in flames!"

That was years ago. The woods are flourishing; the old man is past doingany mischief; but I remember his indignation. And it was the sole case Ihave met with in the parish, of animosity harboured not so much againstpersons as against the existing position of things. This one man wasalive to the injustice of a social arrangement; and in that respect hediffered from the rest of my neighbours, unless I am much deceived inthem. Of course there may be more of envious feeling abroad in thevillage than I know about. It is the sort of thing that would keepitself secret; and perhaps this old man's contemporaries, who shared hisrecollections, silently shared his bitterness too. But if so, I do notbelieve that they have passed the feeling on to their children. Theimpression is strong in me that the people have never learnt to lookupon the distribution of property, which has left them so impoverished, as anything other than an inevitable dispensation of Providence. If theythought otherwise, at any rate if the contrary view were at allprevalent amongst them, they must be most gifted hypocrites, to go aboutwith the good temper in their eyes and the cheerfulness in their voicesthat I have been describing. 

To what should it be attributed--this power of facing poverty withcontentment? To some extent doubtless it rests on Christian teaching, although perhaps not much on the Christian teaching of the present day. Present-day religion, indeed, must often seem to the cottagers atiresome hobby reserved to the well-to-do; but from distant generationsthere seems to have come down, in many a cottage family, a rather loftyreligious sentiment which fosters honesty, patience, resignation, courage. Much of the gravity, much of the tranquillity of soul of themore sedate villagers must be ascribed to this traditional influence, whose effects are attractive enough, in the character and outlook ofmany an old cottage man and woman. 

Yet there is much more in the village temper than can be accounted forby this cause alone. In most of the people the cheerfulness does notsuggest pious resignation, in the hope of the next world; it looks likea grim and lusty determination to make the best of this world. It iscontemptuous, or laughing. As I have shown, it has a tendency to bebeery. It occasionally breaks out into disorder. In fact, if the folkwere not habitually overworked they would be boisterous, jolly. Ofcourse it may all proceed from the strong English nature in them; and inthat case we need seek no other explanation of it. Yet if one influence, namely, a traditional Christianity, is to be credited--as it certainlyshould be--with an effect upon the village character in one direction, then probably, behind this other effect in another direction, some otherinfluence is at work. And for my part I make no doubt of it. Thecheerfulness of the cottagers rests largely upon a survival of theoutlook and habits of the peasant days before the common was enclosed. It is not a negative quality. My neighbours are not merely patient andloftily resigned to distress; they are still groping, dimly, for anenjoyment of life which they have not yet realized to be unattainable. They maintain the peasant spirits. Observe, I do not suggest that theyare intentionally old-fashioned. I do not believe them to be sympatheticat all to those self-conscious revivals of peasant arts which are nowbeing recommended to the poor by a certain type of philanthropists. Theymake no ęsthetic choice. They do not deliberate which of the ancestralcustoms it would be "nice" for them to follow; but, other things beingequal, they incline to go on in the way that has been usual in theirfamilies. It is a tendency that sways them, not a thought-out scheme ofthe way to live. Now and again, perhaps, some memory may strengthen thetendency, as they are reminded of this or that fine old personalityworthy of imitation, or as some circumstance of childhood is recalled, which it would be pleasant to restore; but in the main the force whichbears them on is a traditional outlook, fifty times more potent thandefinite but transient memories. This it is that has to be recognized inmy neighbours. Down in their valley, until the "residents" began toflock in, the old style of thinking lingered on; in the little cottagesthe people, from earliest infancy, were accustomed to hear allthings--persons and manners, houses and gardens, and the day'swork--appraised by an ancient standard of the countryside; andconsequently it happens that this evening while I am writing, out thereon the slopes of the valley the men and women, and the very childrenwhose voices I can just hear, are living by an outlook in which thevalues are different from those of easy-going people, and in which, especially, hardships have never been met by peevishness, but have beenbeaten by good-humour. 

III

THE ALTERED CIRCUMSTANCES

VIII

THE PEASANT SYSTEM

The persistence into the twentieth century--the scarcely realizedpersistence--not so much of any definite ideas, as of a general tempermore proper to the eighteenth century, accounts for all sorts ofanomalies in the village, and explains not only why other people do notunderstand the position of its inhabitants to-day, but why theythemselves largely fail to understand it. They are not fully aware ofbeing behind the times, and probably in many respects they no longer areso; only there is that queer mental attitude giving its bias to theirview of life. Although very feebly now, still the momentum derived froma forgotten cult carries them on. 

But, having noticed the persistence of the peasant traditions, we havenext to notice how inadequate they are to present needs. Our subjectswings round here. Inasmuch as the peasant outlook lingers on in thevalley, it explains many of those peculiarities I have described inearlier chapters; but, inasmuch as it is a decayed and all but uselessoutlook, we shall see in its decay the significance of those changes inthe village which have now to be traced out. The little that is leftfrom the old days has an antiquarian or a gossipy sort of interest; butthe lack of the great deal that has gone gives rise to some most seriousproblems. 

For, as I hinted at the outset, the "peasant" tradition in its vigouramounted to nothing less than a form of civilization--the home-madecivilization of the rural English. To the exigent problems of life itfurnished solutions of its own--different solutions, certainly, fromthose which modern civilization gives, but yet serviceable enough. People could find in it not only a method of getting a living, but alsoan encouragement and a help to live well. Besides employment there wasan intense interest for them in the country customs. There was scope formodest ambition too. Best of all, those customs provided a roughguidance as to conduct--an unwritten code to which, though we forget it, England owes much. It seems singular to think of now; but the verylabourer might reasonably hope for some satisfaction in life, nortrouble about "raising" himself into some other class, so long as hecould live on peasant lines. And it is in the virtual disappearance ofthis civilization that the main change in the village consists. Otherchanges are comparatively immaterial. The valley might have been invadedby the leisured classes; its old appearance might have been altered; allsorts of new-fangled things might have been introduced into it; andstill under the surface it would have retained the essential villagecharacteristics, had but the peasant tradition been preserved in itsintegrity amongst the lowlier people; but with that dying, the village, too, dies where it stands. And that is what has been happening here. Afaint influence from out of the past still has its feeble effect; but, in this corner of England at least, what we used to think of as therural English are, as it were, vanishing away--vanishing as in a slowtransformation, not by death or emigration, not even by essential changeof personnel, but by becoming somehow different in their outlook andhabits. The old families continue in their old home; but they begin tobe a new people. 

It was of the essence of the old system that those living under itsubsisted in the main upon what their own industry could produce out ofthe soil and materials of their own countryside. A few things, certainly, they might get from other neighbourhoods, such as iron formaking their tools, and salt for curing their bacon; and some smallinterchange of commodities there was, accordingly, say between thevarious districts that yielded cheese, and wool, and hops, and charcoal;but as a general thing the parish where the peasant people lived was thesource of the materials they used, and their well-being depended ontheir knowledge of its resources. Amongst themselves they would number afew special craftsmen--a smith, a carpenter or wheelwright, a shoemaker, a pair of sawyers, and so on; yet the trades of these specialists wereonly ancillary to the general handiness of the people, who with theirown hands raised and harvested their crops, made their clothes, did muchof the building of their homes, attended to their cattle, thatched theirricks, cut their firing, made their bread and wine or cider, prunedtheir fruit-trees and vines, looked after their bees, all forthemselves. And some at least, and perhaps the most, of these economieswere open to the poorest labourer. Though he owned no land, yet as thetenant, and probably the permanent tenant, of a cottage and garden hehad the chance to occupy himself in many a craft that tended to his owncomfort. A careful man and wife needed not to despair of becoming richin the possession of a cow or a pig or two, and of good clothes andhousehold utensils; and they might well expect to see their childrengrow up strong and prosperous in the peasant way. 

Thus the claim that I have made for the peasant tradition--namely, thatit permitted a man to hope for well-being without seeking to escape fromhis own class into some other--is justified, partially at least. I admitthat the ambition was a modest one, but there were circumstancesattending it to make it a truly comforting one too. Look once more atthe conditions. The small owners of the parish might occupy more landthan the labourers, and have the command of horses and waggons, andploughs and barns, and so on; but they ate the same sort of food andwore the same sort of clothes as the poorer folk, and they thought thesame thoughts too, and talked in the same dialect, so that the labourerworking for them was not oppressed by any sense of personal inferiority. He might even excel in some directions, and be valued for hisexcellence. Hence, if his ambition was small, the need for it was notvery great. 

And then, this life of manifold industry was interesting to live. It isimpossible to doubt it. Not one of the pursuits I have mentioned failedto make its pleasant demand on the labourer for skill and knowledge; sothat after his day's wage-earning he turned to his wine-making or themanagement of his pigs with the zest that men put into their hobbies. Amateurs the people were of their homely crafts--very clever amateurs, too, some of them. I think it likely, also, that normally evenwage-earning labour went as it were to a peaceful tune. In the elaboratetile-work of old cottage roofs, in the decorated ironwork of decrepitfarm-waggons, in the carefully fashioned field-gates--to name but a fewrelics of the sort--many a village of Surrey and Hampshire and Sussexhas ample proofs that at least the artisans of old time went about theirwork placidly, unhurriedly, taking time to make their products comely. And probably the same peaceful conditions extended to the labouringfolk. Of course, their ploughing and harvesting have left no traces; butthere is much suggestiveness in some little things one may note, suchas the friendly behaviour of carter-men to their horses, and theaccomplished finish given to the thatch of ricks, and the endearingnames which people in out-of-the-way places still bestow upon theircows. Quietly, but convincingly, such things tell their tale oftranquillity, for they cannot have originated amongst a peoplehabitually unhappy and harassed. But whether the day's work wentcomfortably or no, certainly the people's own home-work--to turn to thatagain--must often have been agreeable, and sometimes delightful. Thecottage crafts were not all strictly useful; some had simple ęstheticends. If you doubt it, look merely at the clipped hedges of box and yewin the older gardens; they are the result of long and loving care, butthey serve no particular end, save to please the eye. So, too, ingeneral, if you think that the folk of old were inappreciative ofbeauty, you have but to listen to their names of flowers--sweet-william, hearts-ease, marigold, meadow-sweet, night-shade--for proof that Englishpeasant-life had its graceful side. 

Still, their useful work must, after all, have been the mainstay of thevillagers; and how thoroughly their spirits were immersed in it Isuppose few living people will ever be able to realize. For my part, Idare not pretend to comprehend it; only at times I can vaguely feel whatthe peasant's attitude must have been. All the things of the countrysidehad an intimate bearing upon his own fate; he was not there to admirethem, but to live by them--or, say, to wrest his living from them byfamiliar knowledge of their properties. From long experience--experienceolder than his own, and traditional amongst his people--he knew the soilof the fields and its variations almost foot by foot; he understood thesprings and streams; hedgerow and ditch explained themselves to him; thecoppices and woods, the water-meadows and the windy heaths, the localchalk and clay and stone, all had a place in his regard--reminded him ofthe crafts of his people, spoke to him of the economies of his owncottage life; so that the turfs or the faggots or the timber he handledwhen at home called his fancy, while he was handling them, to thelandscape they came from. Of the intimacy of this knowledge, in minutedetails, it is impossible to give an idea. I am assured of its existencebecause I have come across surviving examples of it, but I may not beginto describe it. One may, however, imagine dimly what the cumulativeeffect of it must have been on the peasant's outlook; how attached hemust have grown--I mean how closely linked--to his own countryside. Hedid not merely "reside" in it; he was part of it, and it was part ofhim. He fitted into it as one of its native denizens, like the hedgehogsand the thrushes. All that happened to it mattered to him. He learnt tolook with reverence upon its main features, and would not willinglyinterfere with their disposition. But I lose the best point in talkingof the individual peasant; these things should rather be said of thetribe--the little group of folk--of which he was a member. As they, intheir successive generations, were the denizens of their little patch ofEngland--its human fauna--so it was with traditional feelings derivedfrom their continuance in the land that the individual peasant man orwoman looked at the fields and the woods. 

Out of all these circumstances--the pride of skill in handicrafts, thedetailed understanding of the soil and its materials, the general effectof the well-known landscape, and the faint sense of something venerablein its associations--out of all this there proceeded an influence whichacted upon the village people as an unperceived guide to their conduct, so that they observed the seasons proper for their varied pursuitsalmost as if they were going through some ritual. Thus, for instance, inthis parish, when, on an auspicious evening of spring, a man and wifewent out far across the common to get rushes for the wife's hop-tying, of course it was a consideration of thrift that sent them off; but anidea of doing the right piece of country routine at the right time gavevalue to the little expedition. The moment, the evening, became enrichedby suggestion of the seasons into which it fitted, and by memories ofyears gone by. Similarly in managing the garden crops: to be too late, to neglect the well-known signs which hinted at what should be done, was more than bad economy; it was dereliction of peasant duty. And thusthe succession of recurring tasks, each one of which seemed to thevillager almost characteristic of his own people in their native home, kept constantly alive a feeling that satisfied him and a usage thathelped him. The feeling was that he belonged to a set of people ratherapart from the rest of the world--a people necessarily different fromothers in their manners, and perhaps poorer and ruder than most, but yetfully entitled to respect and consideration. The usage was just thewhole series or body of customs to which his own people conformed; or, more exactly, the accepted idea in the village of what ought to be donein any contingency, and of the proper way to do it. In short, it wasthat unwritten code I spoke of just now--a sort of _savoir vivre_--whichbecame part of the rural labourer's outlook, and instructed him throughhis days and years. It was hardly reduced to thoughts in hisconsciousness, but it always swayed him. And it was consistentwith--nay, it implied--many strong virtues: toughness to endure longlabour, handiness, frugality, habits of early rising. It was consistenttoo--that must be admitted--with considerable hardness and "coarseness"of feeling; a man might be avaricious, loose, dirty, quarrelsome, andnot offend much against the essential peasant code. Nor was itsinfluence very good upon his intellectual development, as I shall showlater on. Yet whatever its defects, it had those qualities which I havetried to outline; and where it really flourished it ultimately led togracefulness of living and love of what is comely and kindly. You candetect as much still, in the flavour of many a mellow folk-saying, notto mention folk-song; you may divine it yet in all kinds of littlepopular traits, if once you know what to look for. 

In this particular valley, where the barren soil challenged the peopleto a severer struggle for bare subsistence, the tradition could not putforth its fairer, its gentler, features; nevertheless the backbone ofthe village life was of the genuine peasant order. The cottagers had to"rough it, " to dispense with softness, to put up with ugliness; but bytheir own skill and knowledge they forced the main part of their livingout of the soil and materials of their own neighbourhood. And in doingthis they won at least the rougher consolations which that mode of lifehad to offer. Their local knowledge was intensely interesting to them;they took pride in their skill and hardihood; they felt that theybelonged to a set of people not inferior to others, albeit perhapspoorer and ruder; and all the customs which their situation requiredthem to follow sustained their belief in the ancestral notions of goodand evil. In other words, they had a civilization to support them--apoor thing, perhaps, a poor kind of civilization, but their own, andentirely within the reach of them all. I have no hesitation in affirmingall this; because, though I never saw the system in its completeness, Icame here soon enough to find a few old people still partially living byit. These old people, fortunate in the possession of their own cottagesand a little land, were keepers of pigs and donkeys, and even a fewcows. They kept bees, too; they made wine; they often paid in kind forany services that neighbours did for them; and with the food they couldgrow, and the firing they could still obtain from the woods and heath, their living was half provided for. The one of them I knew best was notthe most typical. Shrewd old man that he was, he had adapted himself sofar as suited him to a more commercial economy, and had grown suspiciousand avaricious; yet if he could have been translated suddenly back intothe eighteenth century, he would scarce have needed to change any of hishabits, or even his clothes. He wore an old-fashioned "smock frock, "doubtless home-made; and in this he pottered about all day--pottered, atleast, in his old age, when I knew him--not very spruce as to personalcleanliness, smelling of his cow-stall, saving money, wanting noholiday, independent of books and newspapers, indifferent to anythingthat happened farther off than the neighbouring town, liking his pipeand glass of beer, and never knowing what it was to feel dull. I speakof him because I knew him personally; but there were others of whom Iused to hear, though I never became acquainted with them, who seem tohave been hardly at all tainted with the commercial spirit, and weremore in the position of labourers than this man, yet lived almostdignified lives of simple and self-supporting contentment. Of some ofthem the middle-aged people of to-day still talk, not without respect. 

But in writing of such folk I have most emphatically to use the pasttense; for although a sort of afterglow from the old civilization stillrests upon the village character, it is fast fading out, and it has notmuch resemblance to the genuine thing of half a century ago. The directlight has gone out of the people's life--the light, the meaning, theguidance. They have no longer a civilization, but only some derelicthabits left from that which has gone. And it is no wonder if some ofthose habits seem now stupid, ignorant, objectionable; for the fitnesshas departed from them, and left them naked. They were acquired under adifferent set of circumstances--a set of circumstances whosedisappearance dates from, and was caused by, the enclosure of thecommon. 

IX

THE NEW THRIFT

One usually thinks of the enclosure of a common as a procedure whichtakes effect immediately, in striking and memorable change; yet theevent in this village seems to have made no lasting impression onpeople's minds. The older folk talk about things that happened "beforethe common was enclosed" much as they might say "before the flood, " andoccasionally they discuss the history of some allotment or other madeunder the award; but one hears little from them to suggest that thefateful ordinance seemed to them a fateful one at the time. 

It may be that the stoical village temper is in part accountable forthis indifference. As the arrangement was presumably made over the headsof the people, they doubtless took it in a fatalistic way as a thingthat could not be helped and had better be dismissed from theirthoughts. Were this all, however, I think that I should have heard moreof the matter. Had sudden distress fallen upon the valley, had familiesbeen speedily and obviously ruined by the enclosure, some mention of thefact would surely have reached me. But the truth appears to be thatnothing very definite or striking ensued, to be remembered. The changewas hardly understood, or, at any rate, its importance was notappreciated, by the people concerned. 

Perhaps, indeed, its calamitous nature was veiled at first behind somesmall temporary advantages which sprang from it. True, I question if thebenefits experienced here were equal to those which are said to havebeen realized in similar circumstances elsewhere. In other parishes, where the farmers have been impoverished and the labourers out of work, the latter, at the enclosure of a common, have sometimes found welcomeemployment in digging out or fencing in the boundaries of the newallotments, and in breaking up the fresh ground. So the landowners say. But here, where there were few men wanting constant labour, theopportunity of work to do was hardly called for, and the making ofboundaries was in many cases neglected. In that one way, therefore, notmany can have derived any profit from the enclosure. On the other hand, an advantage was really felt, I think, in the opening that arose forbuilding cottages on the newly-acquired freeholds. Quite a number ofcottages seem to date from that period; and I infer that the opportunitywas seized by various men who wished to provide new house-room forthemselves, or for a married son or daughter. They could still go towork almost on the old lines. Perhaps the recognized price--seventypounds, it is said to have been, for building a cottage of threerooms--would have to be exceeded a little, when timbers for floor androof could no longer be had for the cutting out of fir-trees on thecommon; and yet there, after all, were the trees, inexpensive to buy;and there was the peasant tradition, still unimpaired, to encourage andcommend such enterprise. 

There is really little need, however, for these explanations of thepeople's unconcern at the disaster which had, in fact, befallen them. The passing of the common seemed unimportant at the time, not so muchbecause a few short-lived advantages concealed its meaning as becausethe real disadvantages were slow to appear. At first the enclosure wasrather a nominal event than an actual one. It had been made in theory;in practice it was deferred. I have just said that in many cases theboundaries were left unmarked; I may add now that to this day they havenot quite all been defined, although the few spots which remain unfencedare not worthy of notice. They are to be found only in places wherebuilding is impossible; elsewhere all is now closed in. For it is therecent building boom that has at last caused the enclosure to take itsfull effect. Before that began, not more than ten or twelve years ago, there were abundant patches of heath still left open; and on many a spotwhere nowadays the well-to-do have their tennis or their afternoon tea, of old I have seen donkeys peacefully grazing. The donkeys have had togo, their room being wanted, and not many cottagers can keep a donkeynow; but kept they were, and in considerable numbers, until these lateyears, in spite of the enclosure. But if the end could be deferred solong, one may judge how slowly the change began--slowly andinconspicuously, so that those who saw the beginning could almost ignoreit. Even the cows--once as numerous as the donkeys--were not given upquite immediately, though in a few years they were all gone, I am told. But long after them, heath for thatching and firing might still be cutin waste places; fern continued until six or seven years ago to yieldlitter for pig-sties; and since these things still seemed to go onalmost as well after the enclosure as before it, how should the peoplehave imagined that their ancient mode of life had been cut off at theroots, and that it had really begun to die where it stood, under theirundiscerning eyes?

Nevertheless, that was the effect. To the enclosure of the common morethan to any other cause may be traced all the changes that havesubsequently passed over the village. It was like knocking the keystoneout of an arch. The keystone is not the arch; but, once it is gone, allsorts of forces, previously resisted, begin to operate towards ruin, andgradually the whole structure crumbles down. This fairly illustrateswhat has happened to the village, in consequence of the loss of thecommon. The direct results have been perhaps the least important inthemselves; but indirectly the enclosure mattered, because it left thepeople helpless against influences which have sapped away theirinterests, robbed them of security and peace, rendered their knowledgeand skill of small value, and seriously affected their personal prideand their character. Observe it well. The enclosure itself, I say, wasnot actually the cause of all this; but it was the opening, so to speak, through which all this was let in. The other causes which have been atwork could hardly have operated as they have done if the village lifehad not been weakened by the changes directly due to the loss of thecommon. 

They consisted--those changes--in a radical alteration of the domesticeconomy of the cottagers. Not suddenly, but none the less inevitably, the old thrift--the peasant thrift--which the people understoodthoroughly had to be abandoned in favour of a modern thrift--commercialthrift--which they understood but vaguely. That was the essential effectof the enclosure, the central change directly caused by it; and itstruck at the very heart of the peasant system. 

For note what it involved. By the peasant system, as I have alreadyexplained, people derived the necessaries of life from the materials andsoil of their own countryside. Now, so long as they had the common, theinhabitants of the valley were in a large degree able to conform to thissystem, the common being, as it were, a supplement to the cottagegardens, and furnishing means of extending the scope of the little homeindustries. It encouraged the poorest labourer to practise, forinstance, all those time-honoured crafts which Cobbett, in his littlebook on Cottage Economy, had advocated as the one hope for labourers. The cow-keeping, the bread-making, the fattening of pigs and curing ofbacon, were actually carried on here thirty years after Cobbett's time, besides other things not mentioned by him, such as turf-cutting on theheath and wheat-growing in the gardens. But it was the common that madeall this possible. It was only by the spacious "turn-out" which itafforded that the people were enabled to keep cows and get milk andbutter; it was only with the turf-firing cut on the common that theycould smoke their bacon, hanging it in the wide chimneys over those oldopen hearths where none but such fuel could be used; and, again, it wasonly because they could get furze from the common to heat their breadovens that it was worth their while to grow a little wheat at home, andhave it ground into flour for making bread. With the common, however, they could, and did, achieve all this. I am not dealing in supposition. I have mentioned nothing here that I have not learnt from men whoremember the system still flourishing--men who in their boyhood tookpart in it, and can tell how the turfs were harvested, and how thepig-litter was got home and stacked in ricks; men who, if you lead themon, will talk of the cows they themselves watched over on theheath--two from this cottage, three from that one yonder, one more fromMaster Hack's, another couple from Trusler's, until they have numbered ascore, perhaps, and have named a dozen old village names. It allactually happened. The whole system was "in full swing" here, withinliving memory. But the very heart of it was the open common. 

Accordingly, when the enclosure began to be a fact, when the cottagerwas left with nothing to depend upon save his garden alone, as a peasanthe was a broken man--a peasant shut out from his countryside and cut offfrom his resources. True, he might still grow vegetables, and keep a pigor two, and provide himself with pork; but there was little else that hecould do in the old way. It was out of the question to obtain most ofhis supplies by his own handiwork: they had to be procured, ready-made, from some other source. That source, I need hardly say, was a shop. Sothe once self-supporting cottager turned into a spender of money at thebaker's, the coal-merchant's, the provision-dealer's; and, of course, needing to spend money, he needed first to get it. 

The change was momentous, as events have sufficiently proved. In thematter of earning, to be sure, the difference has appeared rather in theattitude of the people than in the actual method of going about to getmoney. To a greater or less extent, most of them were alreadywage-earners, though not regularly. If a few had been wont to furnishthemselves with money in true peasant fashion--that is to say, byselling their goods, their butter, or milk, or pig-meat, instead oftheir labour--still, the majority had wanted for their own use whateverthey could produce in this way, and had been obliged to sell theirlabour itself, when they required money. Wage-earning, therefore, was nonew thing in the village; only, the need to earn became more insistent, when so many more things than before had to be bought with the wages. Consequently, it had to be approached in a more businesslike, a morecommercial, spirit. Unemployment, hitherto not much worse than aregrettable inconvenience, became a calamity. Every hour's work acquireda market value. The sense of taking part in time-honoured duties of thecountryside disappeared before the idea--so very important now--ofgetting shillings with which to go to a shop; while even the homeindustries which were still practicable began to be valued in terms ofmoney, so that a man was tempted to neglect his own gardening if hecould sell his labour in somebody else's garden. Thus undermined, thepeasant outlook gave way, perforce, to that of the modern labourer, andthe old attachment to the countryside was weakened. In all this changeof attitude, however, we see only one of those indirect results of theenclosure of the common which were spoken of above. If the villagersbecame more mercenary, it was not because the fencing in of the heathsimmediately caused them to become so, but because it left them helplessto resist becoming so--left them a prey to considerations whose weightthey had previously not so much felt. After all, the new order of thingsdid but intensify the need of wage-earning; it made no difference in theprocedure of it. 

But in regard to spending the case was otherwise. Under the old régime, although probably a small regular expenditure of money had been usual, yet in the main the peasant's expenditure was not regular, butintermittent. Getting so much food and firing by his own labour, hemight go for weeks without needing more than a few shillings to make upoccasional deficiencies. His purse was subject to no such constant drainas that for which the modern labourer has to provide. In short, theregular expenses were small, the occasional ones not crushing. Butto-day, when the people can no longer produce for themselves, theproportion has changed. It has swung round so completely that nearly allthe expenses have become regular, while those of the other sort havewellnigh disappeared. Every week money has to be found, and not only, asof old, for rent, and boots, and for some bread and flour, but also forbutter or margarine, sugar, tea, bacon or foreign meat if possible, lard, jam, and--in the winter, at least--coal. Even water is an item ofweekly expense; for where the company's water is laid on to a cottage, there is sixpence a week or so added to the rent. The only importantthing which is still not bought regularly is clothing. The people gettheir clothes when they can, and when they positively must. 

As a result, the former thrift of the village has been entirelysubverted. For earning and spending are not the whole of economy. Thereis saving to be considered; and, in consequence of the turn-over ofexpenses from the occasional to the regular group, the cottagers havebeen obliged to resort to methods of saving specially adapted to thechanged conditions. The point is of extreme importance. Under the oldstyle, a man's chief savings were in the shape of commodities ready foruse, or growing into use. They were, too, a genuine capital, inasmuch asthey supported him while he replaced and increased them. The flitches ofbacon, the little stores of flour and home-made wine, the stack offiring, the small rick of fern or grass, were his savings-bank, which, while he drew from it daily, he replenished betimes as he planted hisgarden, and brought home heath and turf from the common, and minded hispigs and his cow, and put by odd shillings for occasional need. Noticethat putting-by of shillings. It was not the whole, it was only thecompletion, of the peasant's thrift. At a pinch he could even do withoutthe money, paying for what he wanted with a sack of potatoes, or a day'swork with his donkey-cart; but a little money put by was a convenience. When it was wanted, it was wanted in lump sums--ten shillings now, say, for a little pig; and then fifteen shillings or so in six weeks' timefor mending the donkey-cart, and so on; and, thanks to the real savingsin the shape of food and firing ready for use, the shillings, howevercome by, could be hoarded up. 

But under the new thrift they cannot be so hoarded up; nor, fortunately, are the little lump sums so necessary as before. The real savings now, the real stores of useful capital, are no longer in the cottager's home. They are in shops. What the modern labourer chiefly requires, therefore, is not a little hoard of money lying by, but a regular supply of money, a constant stream of it, flowing in, to enable him to go to the shopsregularly. In a word, he wants an income--a steady income of shillings. And since his earnings are not steady--since his income may cease anyday, and continue in abeyance for weeks at a time, during which theshops will be closed against him, his chief economy is directed upon theobject of insuring his weekly income. Most miserably for him, he hasnever been able to insure it against all reverses. Against tradedepression, which throws him out of work and dries up the stream ofmoney that should come flowing in, he has no protection. He has none ifhis employer should go bankrupt, or leave the neighbourhood, and dismisshim; none against the competition of machinery. Still, the labourers doas much as they can. Sickness, at least, does not find them unprepared. To cover loss of wages during sickness, they pay into a benefit society. The more careful, indeed, pay into two--the Oddfellows or the Foresters, or some such society--and a local "slate-club. " I have known men out ofwork living on tea and bread, and not much of that, so that they maykeep up their club payments, and be sure of an income if they shouldfall sick; and I have known men so circumstanced immediately feel theadvantage if sickness should actually fall upon them. 

This is the new thrift, which has replaced that of the peasant. I do notsay that there is no other saving--that no little sums are hoarded up;for, in fact, I could name one or two men who, after illness protractedto the stage when sick-pay from the club is reduced, have still foughtoff destitution with the small savings from better times. In most cases, however, no hoarding is possible. The club takes all the spare money;and the club alone stands between the labourer and destitution. And letthis be clearly understood. At first it looks as if the member of a clubhad money invested in his society--money there, instead of perishablegoods at home. Yet, in fact, that is not the case. His payments into theclub funds are no investment. They bring him no profit; they are not auseful capital that can be renewed with interest. At the Christmas"share-out" he does get back a part of the twenty-six shillingscontributed to the slate-club during the year; but the two pounds ayear paid to the benefit society are his no longer; they cannot be"realized"; they are gone beyond reclaiming. Though he be out of workand his family starving, he cannot touch the money; to derive anyadvantage from it he himself must first fall ill. That is what themodern thrift means to the labourer. It does nothing to further--on thecontrary, it retards--his prosperity; but it helps him in a particularkind of adversity. It drains his personal wealth away, and leaves himdestitute of his capital; it robs his wife and children of his savings;but in return it makes him one of a brotherhood which guarantees to hima minimum income for a short time, if he should be out of health. 

An oldish man, who had been telling me one evening how they used to livein his boyhood, looked pensively across the valley when he had done, andso stood for a minute or two, as if trying to recover his impressions ofthat lost time. At last, with appearance of an effort to speakpatiently, "Ah, " he said, "they tells me times are better now, but Ican't see it;" and it was plain enough that he thought our present timesthe worse. So far as this valley is concerned I incline to agree withhim, although in general it is a debatable question. On the one hand, itmay be that the things a labourer can buy at a shop for fifteenshillings a week are more in quantity and variety, if not better inquality, than those which his forefathers could produce by their ownindustry; and to that extent the advantage is with the present times. But, on the other hand, the fifteen shillings are not every weekforthcoming; and whereas the old-time cottager out of work couldgenerally find something profitable to do for himself, the modern man, having once got his garden into order, stands unprofitably idle. 

Perhaps the worst is that, owing to the lowness of their wages, thepeople have never been able to give the new thrift a fair trial. Afterall, they miss the lump sums laid by against need. If their earningswould ever overtake their expenses and give a little margin, they mightdo better; but buying, as they are obliged to do, from hand to mouth, they buy at extravagant prices. Coal, for instance, which costs me abouttwenty-six shillings for a ton, costs the labourer half as much again asthat, because he can only pay for a hundredweight or so at a time. So, too, the boots he can get for four or five shillings a pair are thedearest of all boots. They wear out in a couple of months or so, andanother pair must be bought almost before another four or five shillingscan be spared. In its smaller degree, a still more absurd difficultyhandicaps the people in dealing with their own fruit-crops. To makeraspberry or gooseberry jam should be, you would think, an economydelightful to the cottage women, if only as a piece of old-fashionedthrift; yet they rarely do it. If they had the necessary utensils, still the weekly money at their disposal will not run to the purchase ofextra firing and sugar. It is all too little for everyday purposes, andthey are glad to eke it out by selling their fruit for middle-classwomen to preserve, though in the end they have to buy for their ownfamilies an inferior quality of jam at a far higher price. 

Wherever you follow it up, you will find the modern thrift not quitesuccessful in the cottages. It is not elastic enough; or, rather, thepeople's means are not elastic enough, and will not stretch to itsdemands. There is well-being in it--variety of food, for instance, andcomfort of clothing--as soon as both ends can be made to meet and to lapover a little; but it strains the small incomes continually to thebreaking-point, so that every other consideration has to give way underit to a pitiful calculation of pence. For the sake of pence the peoplewho keep fowls sell the eggs, and feed their children on bread andmargarine; and, on the same principle, they do not even seek to produceother things which are well within their power to produce, but are tooluxurious for their means. "'Twouldn't be no use for me to growstrawberries, " a man explained; "my children'd have 'em. " It sounded astrange reason, for to what better use could strawberries be put? But itshows how tightly the people are bound down by their commercialconditions. In order to make the Saturday's shopping easier, they mustweigh the shillings and pence value of everything they possess andeverything they attempt to do. 

These considerations, however, though showing that present times are notgood, do not prove that they are worse than past times. It may be thatthere was poverty in the valley before the enclosure of the common quiteas severe as there is now; and, so far as concerns mere economics, thatevent did but change the mode of the struggle for existence, withoutgreatly affecting its intensity. People are poor in a different way now, that is all. Hence, in its more direct results, the loss of the commonhas not mattered much, and it might be forgotten if those results werethe only ones. 

But they are not the only ones. The results have spread from theeconomic centre outwards until the whole life of the people has beenaffected, new influences coming into play which previously were butlittle felt. So searching, indeed, has the change been, and sorevolutionary, that anything like a full account of it would be out ofthe question. The chapters that follow, therefore, do not pretend todeal with it at all exhaustively; at most they will but draw attentionto a few of its more striking aspects. 

X

COMPETITION

When the half-peasant men of the valley began to enter the labour marketas avowed wage-earners, a set of conditions confronted them which we areapt to think of as established by a law of Nature, but which, in fact, may be almost unknown in a peasant community. For the first time theimportance of a "demand for labour" came home to them. I do not say thatit was wholly a new thing; but to the older villagers it had not been, as it is now to their descendants, the dominating factor in theirstruggle for life. On the contrary, in proportion as their labour wasbestowed immediately on productive work for their own uses, the questionwhether there was a demand for labour elsewhere did not arise. Thecommon was indifferent; it wanted none of them. It neither asked them toavail themselves of its resources, nor paid them money for doing so, norrefused employment to one because another was already engaged there. Butto-day, instead of going for a livelihood to the impartial heath, thepeople must wait for others to set them to work. The demand which theysupply is their own no longer, and no longer, therefore, is theirliving in their own hands. Of all the old families in the village, Ithink there are only two left now who have not drifted wholly into thisdependent state; but I know numbers of labourers, often out of work, whose grandfathers were half independent of employers. 

In theory, no doubt the advantage ought to be with the present times. Under the new system a far larger population is able to live in theparish than could possibly have been supported here under the old; fornow, in place of the scanty products of the little valley and theheaths, the stores of the whole world may be drawn upon by theinhabitants in return for the wages they earn. Only there is the awkwardcondition that they must earn wages. Those limitless stores cannot beapproached by the labourer until he is invited--until there is "ademand" for his labour. Property owners, or capitalists, standingbetween him and the world's capital, are able to pick and choose betweenhim and his neighbours as the common never did, and to decide which ofthem shall work and have some of the supplies. 

And as a consequence of this picking and choosing, competition amongstthe labourers seeking to be employed has become the accepted conditionof getting a living in the village, and it is to a great extent a newcondition. Previously there was little room for anything of the kind. The old thrift lent itself to co-operation rather. I admit that I havenever heard of any system being brought into the activities of thisvalley, such as I witnessed lately in another part of England, where thesmall farmers, supplying an external market, and having no hired labour, were helping one another to get their corn harvested, all beingsolicitous for their neighbours' welfare, and giving, not selling, theirlabour. Here the conditions hardly required such wholesale co-operationas that; but in lesser matters both kindliness and economy would counselthe people to be mutually helpful, and there is no reason to doubt thatthe counsel was taken. Those who had donkey-carts would willingly bringhome turfs for those who had none, in return for help with their ownturf-cutting. The bread-ovens, I know, were at the disposal of othersbesides the owners. At pig-killing, at thatching, at clearing out wells(where, in fact, I have seen the thing going on), the people would putthemselves at one another's service. They still do so in cases wherethere is no question of earning money for a living. And if the spirit offriendly co-operation is alive now, when it can so rarely be put inpractice, one may readily suppose that it was fairly vigorous fiftyyears ago. 

But no spirit of co-operation may now prompt one wage-earner to ask, oranother to proffer, assistance in working for wages. As well might oneshopkeeper propose to wait on another's customers for him. Employerswould not have it; still less would those who are employed. A man maybe fainting at his job, but none dare help him. He would resent, hewould fear, the proposal. The job is, as it were, his property; as longas he can stand and see he must hold it against all comers, because inlosing hold he loses his claim upon the world's supplies of thenecessaries of life. 

In spite of all the latent good-will, therefore, and in spite of thefact that the cottagers are all on the same social level, intimacies donot thrive amongst them. If there was formerly any parochial sentimentin the village, any sense of community of interest, it has all beenbroken up by the exigencies of competitive wage-earning, and each familystands by itself, aloof from all the others. The interests clash. Menwho might be helpful friends in other circumstances are in the positionof rival tradesmen competing for the patronage of customers. Not now maytheir labour be a bond of friendship between them; it is a commoditywith a market value, to be sold in the market. Hence, just as in trade, every man for himself is the rule with the villagers; just as in trade, the misfortune of one is the opportunity of another. All the maxims ofcompetitive commerce apply fully to the vendor of his own labour. Theremust be "no friendship in business"; the weakest must go to the wall. Each man is an individualist fighting for his own hand; and to give aslittle as he can for as much as he can get is good policy for him, withprecisely the same limitations as those that govern the trading of theretail merchant, tormented with the conflicting necessities ofovercharging and underselling. 

It follows that the villagers are a prey to jealousy and suspicion--not, perhaps, when they meet at the public-house or on the road, but in thepresence of employers, when any question of employment arises. At suchtimes one would think that labouring men have no critics so unkindly astheir own neighbours and equals. It is true those who are in constantwork are commended; but if you ask about a man who is "on the market"and open for any work that may be going, his rivals are unlikely toanswer generously. "So-and-So?. .. H'm!. .. He do's his best; but he don'tseem to get _through_, somehow. " "Old Who-is-it? Asked _he_ to come andhelp me, have ye? Well, you'll judge for yourself; but I don't hardlyfancy he'll suit. " Or, again: "Well, we all knows how 'tis withWhat's-his-name. I don't say but what he keeps on work right enough; buthe'll have to jump about smarter 'n what I've ever knowed 'n, if he's towork 'long o' me. " So, too often, and sometimes in crueller terms, Ihave heard efficient labourers speak of their neighbours. Certainly itis not all envy. An active man finds it penance to work with a slow one, and worse than penance; for his own reputation may suffer, if his ownoutput of work should be diminished by the other's fault. That neighbourof mine engaged at hop-drying doubtless had good grounds forexasperation with the helper sent into the kiln, when he complained tothe master: "Call that a _man_ you sent me? If that's what you calls aman, I'd sooner you let me send for my old woman! Blamed if she wouldn'tdo better than that feller!" Detraction like this, no doubt, is oftenjustified; but when it becomes the rule, the only possible inference isthat an instinctive jealousy prompts men to it, in instinctiveself-preservation. 

Yet there are depths of dishonour--depths not unknown amongstemployers--into which the village labourers will rarely condescend toplunge, acute though the temptation may be. Not once have I met with aninstance of one man deliberately scheming to get another man's job awayfrom him. A labourer unable to keep up with his work will do almostanything to avoid having a helper thrust upon him--he fears theintroduction of a possible rival into his preserve. But this is not thesame thing as pushing another man out; it has no resemblance to thebehaviour of the hustling capitalist, who opens his big business withthe definite intention of capturing trade away from little businesses. That is a course to which my impoverished neighbours will not stoop. Thenearest thing to it which I have known was the case of those menmentioned in an earlier chapter, who applied for Bettesworth's workduring his last illness. They came, however, believing the place to bevacant; and one and all, with a sincerity I never doubted, deprecatedthe idea of desiring to take it away from him. In fact, the applicationwas distasteful to them. Nothing, I believe, would have prevailed uponthem to make it, short of that hunger for constant employment which manyof the men feel now, under their new competitive thrift. That theyshould have been scrupulous at all was to their credit. All theircircumstances constrain the people to be selfish, secret about theirhopes, swift to be first in the field where a chance occurs. And it issurprising how vigilant a lookout is kept, and how wide a district itcovers. By what routes the news of new employment travels I do not know, but travel it does, fast and far. Men rise early and walk many miles tobe before others at some place where they have heard of work to be had;and one gets the impression, sometimes, of a population silently butkeenly watching to see what opportunity of well-being may suddenly fallto them, not in general, but individually. 

Do what they will to be neighbourly, competition for the privilege ofearning wages separates them sooner or later. There were two men I knewwho maintained a sort of comradeship in work during several years, sothat one of them would not take a job unless there was room for theother, and if either was paid off, the other left with him. They wereamongst the ablest labourers in the parish, used to working long hoursat high pressure, and indifferent to what they did, provided that thepay was good. I heard of them from time to time--now at railway work, now at harvesting, now helping where a bridge was being built, and soon. It was the depression of the winter of 1908-09 that finally broke uptheir comradeship. During those miserable months even these two wereunemployed, and went short of food at times; and now they are workingseparately--competing one against the other, in fact. 

XI

HUMILIATION

Still more than the relations of the villagers with their own kind theirrelations with other sorts of people have suffered change under the newthrift. To just that extent to which the early inhabitants of the valleywere peasants, they formed, as it were, a separate group, careless ofthe outer world and its concerns. They could afford to ignore it, and tobe ignored by it. To them, so well suited with their own outlook andcustoms, it was a matter of small importance, though all England shouldhave other views than theirs, and other manners. And the outer world, onits side, was equally indifferent. It left the villagers to go their ownqueer way, and recognized--as it does in the case of other separategroups of folk, such as fishermen or costermongers--that what seemedsingular in them was probably justified by the singularity of theircircumstances. Nobody supposed that they were a wrong or a regrettabletype who ought to be "done good to" or reformed. They belonged to theirown set. They were English, of course; but they were outside theordinary classifications of English society. 

Even towards those of them who went out of the valley to earn wagesthis was still the attitude. They went out as peasants, and wereesteemed because they had the ability of peasants. In much the same wayas country folk on the Continent take their country produce into townmarkets the men of this valley took, into the hop-grounds and fields ofthe neighbouring valley, or into its old-fashioned streets and stableyards, their toughness, their handiness, their intimate understanding ofcountry crafts; and, returning home in the evening, they slipped backagain into their natural peasant state, without any feeling ofdisharmony from the day's employment. 

There was no reason why it should be otherwise. Although, at work, theyhad come into contact with people unlike themselves in some ways, thecontrast was not of such a kind that it disheartened or seemed todisgrace them. At the time of the enclosure of the common, a notabledevelopment, certainly, was beginning amongst the employing classes, butit had not then proceeded far. Of course the day of the yeoman farmerwas almost done; and with it there had disappeared some of that equalitywhich permitted wage-earning men to be on such easy terms with theirmasters as one hears old people describe. No longer, probably, would afarmer take a nickname from his men, or suffer them to call hisdaughters familiarly by their Christian names; and no longer did masterand man live on quite the same quality of food, or dress in the samesort of clothes. Nevertheless the distinction between employers andemployed--between the lower middle-class and the working-class--was notnearly so marked fifty years ago as it has since become. The farmers, for their part, were still veritable country folk, inheritors themselvesof a set of rural traditions nearly akin to those of the peasantsquatters in this valley. And even the townsmen, who were the onlyothers who could give employment to these villagers, were extremelycountrified in character. In their little sleepy old town--not half itspresent size, and the centre then of an agricultural and especially ahop-growing district--people were intimately interested in countrythings. No matter what a man's trade or profession--linen-draper, orsaddler, or baker, or lawyer, or banker--he found it worth while towatch the harvests, and to know a great deal about cattle and sheep, andmore than a great deal about hops. Some of the tradesmen were, in fact, growing wealthy as hop-planters; and one and all identified themselveswith the outdoor industries of the neighbourhood. And though some grewrich, and changed their style of living, they did not change theirmental equipment, but continued (as I myself remember) more "provincial"than many a farmer is nowadays. All their thoughts, all their ideas, could be quite well expressed in the West Surrey and Hampshire dialect, which the townspeople, like the village folk, continued to speak. 

Meanwhile, the work required by these employers ran, as yet, very muchon antiquated lines. Perhaps it was that the use of machinery hadreceived a setback, twenty years earlier, by the "Swing Riots, " of whicha few memories still survive; at any rate haymaking, harvesting, threshing--all the old tasks, indeed--were still done by hand; thatchhad not gone out of use for barns and stables; nor, for house-roofs, hadimported slates quite taken the place of locally made tiles. The truthis, the town, in its more complex way, had not itself passed far beyondthe primitive stage of dependence on local resources and local skill. Itis really surprising how few were the materials, or even the finishedgoods, imported into it at that time. Clothing stuffs and metals werethe chief of them. Of course the grocers (not "provision merchants"then) did their small trade in sugar and coffee, and tea and spices;there was a tinware shop, an ironmonger's, a wine-merchant's; and allthese necessarily were supplied from outside. But, on the other hand, noforeign meat or flour, or hay or straw or timber, found their way intothe town, and comparatively few manufactured products from other partsof England. Carpenters still used the oak and ash and elm of theneighbourhood, sawn out for them by local sawyers: the wheelwright, because iron was costly, mounted his cartwheels on huge axles fashionedby himself out of the hardest beech; the smith, shoeing horses orputting tyres on wheels, first made the necessary nails for himself, hammering them out on his own anvil. So, too, with many other things. Boots, brushes, earthenware, butter and lard, candles, bricks--they wereall of local make; cheese was brought back from Weyhill Fair in thewaggons which had carried down the hops; in short, to an extent hard torealize, the town was independent of commerce as we know it now, andlooked to the farms and forests and the claypits and coppices of theneighbourhood for its supplies. A leisurely yet steady traffic in ruralproduce therefore passed along its streets, because it was thelife-centre, the heart, of its own countryside; and the villagelabourer, going in and out upon his town tasks, or even working all dayin some secluded yard behind the street, still found a sort ofhomeliness in the materials he handled, and was in touch with the ideasand purposes of his employer. 

Owing to these same circumstances, the wage-earners of that day enjoyedwhat their descendants would consider a most blissful freedom fromanxiety. On the one side, the demand for labour was fairly steady. Itwas the demand of a community not rapidly growing in numbers, nor yetsubject to crazes and sudden changes of a fashion--a communitypatiently, nay, cheerfully, conservative in its ambitions, not given torash speculation, but contented to go plodding on in its time-honouredand modest well-being. What the townsfolk wanted one year they wantedthe next, and so onwards with but quiet progress. And as the demand forlabour was thus steady, so on the other side was the supply of it. Adissatisfied employer could not advertise, then, in a London dailypaper, and get scores of men applying to him for work at a day's notice;nor, indeed, would strangers have been able to do the work in manycases, so curiously was its character determined by local conditions. Besides, town opinion, still prejudiced by memories of the old Poor Law, would have viewed with extreme disfavour, had such an experiment everbeen tried, the importation of men and families whose coming must surelyresult in pauperism for somebody, and in a consequent charge upon therates. 

So, putting together the leading factors--namely, a steady demand forcountrified labour, a steady supply of it, and an employing class fullof country ideas--we get a rough idea of the conditions of wage-earningin the neighbourhood, when the folk of this valley, fenced out fromtheir common, were forced to look to wage-earning as their sole means ofliving. That the conditions were ideal it would be foolish to suppose;but that, for villagers at least, they had certain advantages overpresent conditions is not to be denied. Especially we may note twounpleasing features of modern wage-earning which had not then made theirappearance. 

In the first place, the work itself was interesting to do, was almostworth doing for its own sake, when it still called for much old-worldskill and knowledge, and when the praises of the master were thepraises of an expert who well knew what he was talking about. On theseterms, it was no mean pleasure that the able labouring men had in theirlabour. They took a pride in it--as you may soon discern if you willlisten to the older men talking. I have heard them boast, as of atriumph, of the fine flattering surprise of some master, when he hadcome to look at their day's work, and found it more forward, or betterdone, than he had dared to hope. The words he said are treasured up withdelight, and repeated with enthusiasm, after many years. 

As for the other point, it has already been touched upon. Harsh theemployers might be--more callous by far, I believe, than they are now;but in their general outlook they were not, as yet, so very far removedfrom the men who worked for them. Their ideas of good and bad were suchas the peasant labourer from this valley could understand; and masterand man were not greatly out of touch in the matter of civilization. Itmade a vast difference to the labourer's comfort. He might be hectored, bullied, cheated even, but he hardly felt himself degraded too. It wasnot a being out of another sphere that oppressed him; not one whodespised him, not one whose motives were strange and mysterious. Thecruellest oppression was inhuman rather than unhuman--the act, afterall, only of a more powerful, not of a more dazzling, personage--so thatit produced in him no humiliating sense of belonging to an inferiororder of creation. And, of course, oppression was exceptional. Employerswere obliged to get on comfortably with their work-people, by theconditions governing the supply of labour. I have in my mind severalcases mentioned to me by people long ago dead, in which men for variousfaults (drunkenness in one instance, theft in another) were dismissedfrom their employment again and again, yet as often reinstated, becausethe master found it easier to put up with their faults than to dowithout their skill. It may be inferred, therefore, that ordinary mengot along fairly well with their masters in the ordinary course. 

This state of things, however, has gradually passed away. As I shallshow in another chapter, the labourer may now take but little interestand but little pride in his work; but the change in that direction isnot more pronounced than is the change in the relations between thevillagers and the employing classes. It is a cruel evil that the folk ofthe valley have suffered there. No longer are they a group whosepeculiarities are respected while their qualities are esteemed. In theirintercourse with the outer world they have become, as it were, degraded, humiliated; and when they go out of the valley to earn wages, it is totake the position of an inferior and almost servile race. The reason isthat the employing class, as a whole, has moved on, leaving thelabourers where they were, until now a great gulf divides them. Merelyin relative wealth, if that were all, the difference has widenedenormously. Seventy or eighty years ago, I have heard say, theshopkeeper in the town who had as much as a hundred pounds put by wasthought a rich man. There are now many artisans there whose savingsexceed that figure, while the property of the townsmen who employ labouris, of course, valued often in thousands. The labouring people aloneremain without savings, as poor as their grandfathers when the commonwas first enclosed. 

But it is a question of civilization far more than of wealth that nowdivides the employing classes from the employed. The former havediscarded much of their provincialism; they are astir with ambitions andideas at which the old town would have stood aghast. In beliefs and intastes they are a new people. They have new kinds of knowledge; almostone may say that they use their brains in new ways; and the result isthat between them and the village labourer mutual understanding hasbroken down. How far the separation has gone is betrayed in the factthat the countrified speech, common to village and town fifty years ago, has become a subject of derision to the town-people, forgetful of theirown ancestry. So, in field and street and shop, the two kinds of folkmeet face to face, not with an outlook, and hardly with a speech, whichboth can appreciate, but like distinct races, the one dominant, theother subject. 

And, all but inevitably, the breach is daily widened by the conditionson which the new civilization of the employing class is based. For, withall its good features, it is rather a barbaric civilization, in thissense--that it is more a matter of fineness in possessions than inpersonal qualities. It cannot be maintained without a costly apparatusof dress and furniture, and of drudges to do the dirty work; andconsequently it demands success in that competitive thrift which gives agood money-income. Without that the employers are nowhere. They arethemselves driven very hard; they must make things pay; to secure themeans of civilization for themselves, they must get them out of thelabourer with his eighteen shillings a week. In vain, therefore, arethey persuaded by their newest ideas to see in him an Englishman as goodas themselves: they may assent to the principle, but in practice it isas imperative as ever to make him a profitable drudge. Accordingly, those relations of mutual approval which were not uncommon of oldbetween master and man cannot now be maintained. If it is impossible forthe village folk to understand the town folk, it is equally impossiblefor the town folk to understand the village folk. They cannot afford tounderstand. The peasant outlook is out of date--a cast-off thing; andfor cleaving to it the labourer is despised. If he could be civilized, and yet be made to "pay, " that is what would best suit themiddle-classes; and that is really the impossible object at which theyaim, when they try to "do him good. " They want to make him more likethemselves, and yet keep him in his place of dependence and humiliation. 

It must be said that amongst a section of the employers there is nodesire to "do good" even on these terms. While the labouring people, ontheir side, betray little or no class feeling of hostility towardsemployers, the converse is not true, but jealousy, suspicion, somefear--the elements of bitter class-war, in fact--frequently mark theattitude of middle-class people towards the labouring class. It seems tobe forgotten that the men are English. One hears them spoken of as analien and objectionable race, worth nothing but to be made to work. Theunemployment which began to beggar so many of my village neighboursafter the South African War was actually welcomed by numerous employersin this district. "It will do the men good, " people said to me; "it willteach them their place. They were getting too independent. " The electionof 1906, when the Conservative member for the division was unseated, brought out a large crop of similarly malevolent expressions. "Look atthe class of people who have the vote, " said a disgusted villa lady, with her nose in the air. "Only the low, ignorant people wear thosecolours, " another lady assured her little boy, whose eyes preferred"those colours" to the favours in his own buttonhole. More pointed wasthe overheard remark of a well-to-do employer, irritated by the electioncrowds in the town: "As my wife says, it was bad enough before. Thechildren of the lower classes used, as it was, to take the inside of thepavement, and we had to walk on the kerb. But now we shall be driven outinto the road. "

I would not mention these things were it not for their significance tothe village folk. By becoming wage-earners solely, the villagers havefallen into the disfavour of an influential section of themiddle-classes, most of whom have no other desire than to keep them in asufficient state of servility to be useful. How else is one to interpretthat frequent middle-class outcry against education: "What are we goingto do for servants?" or how else the grudging attitude taken up towardsthe few comforts that cottage people are able to enjoy? I listenedlately to two men talking of "Tariff Reform"--one of them a commercialtraveller, lofty in his patriotism. When mention was made of some oldman's tale, that in his boyhood be rarely tasted meat, "unless a sheepdied, " the commercial traveller commented scornfully, "And now everyworking man in the kingdom thinks he must have meat twice a day"--asthough such things ought not to be in the British Empire. The falsehoodof the remark enhanced its significance. It was the sort of thing to sayin hotel-bars, or in the offices of commerce--the sort of thing thatgoes down well with employers. It indicated that the animus of which Iam speaking is almost a commonplace. In truth, I have heard it expresseddozens of times, in dozens of ways, yet always with the same impliedsuggestion, that the English labouring classes are a lower order ofbeings, who must be treated accordingly. 

And yet employers of this type, representing the wealth, perhaps, but byno means the culture, of modern civilization, are, in fact, nearer tothe unlettered labourers in their outlook, and are therefore by far lessembarrassing to them, than those of another and kindlier type whichfigures largely in this parish to-day. Those people for whom theenclosure of the common, as it has turned out, made room in thevalley--I mean the well-to-do residents--employ local labour, not forprofit at all, but to minister to their own pleasure, in their gardensand stables, and the majority of them would be genuinely glad to behelpful to their poorer neighbours. The presence of poverty reproachesthem; their consciences are uneasy; or, better still, some kind ofregard, some kind of respect, goes out from them towards the toilsomemen and the over-burdened women whom, in fact, they have displaced. Yetcompassion is not the same thing as understanding, and the cottagersknow very well that even their best friends of this kind have neitherthe knowledge nor the taste to appreciate them in their own way. Sympathy for their troubles--yes, there is that; but sympathy withtheir enjoyments hardly any property-owner dreams of cultivating; andthis is the more true the more the property-owner has been polished byhis own civilization. A lady long resident here was quite surprised tohear from me, some months ago, that the cottagers are ardent gardeners. "Dear me!" she said; "I had no idea of it. " And yet one of the ablestmen of the parish had tended her own garden for years. 

Hence it is in their intercourse with these--the well-meaning andcultivated--that the villagers are most at a loss. In those embitteredemployers who merely seek to make money out of him the labourer does atleast meet with some keen recognition of his usefulness; but with theseothers he is all at sea. Non-introspective, a connoisseur of gardencrops and of pig-sties, and of saved-up seeds; cunning to understand the"set" of spade or hoe, and the temper of scythe and fag-hook; jealous ofthe encroachment of gravelled walk or evergreen hedge upon the usefulsoil; an expert in digging and dunging--he is very well aware that thepraises of the villa-people employing him are ignorant praises. His bestskill is, after all, overlooked. The cunning of his craft excites inthem none of the sympathy of a fellow-expert, and is but poorly rewardedby their undiscriminating approval. At the same time, the things whichthese people require of him--the wanton things they ask him to do withthe soil, levelling it to make lawns, wasting it upon shrubberies anddrives, while they fence-in the heath patches and fence-out thepublic--prove to him more fully than any language can do that they put adifferent sort of value upon the countryside from its old value, andthat they care not a straw for the mode of life that was his before theycame here. All their ways are eloquent of condemnation of his tastes. And yet again, while his old skill fails to be understood, and his oldoutlook to be appreciated, he finds that the behaviour preferred in himis oftener than not a behaviour which his forefathers would have thoughtsilly, to say the least--a finikin, fastidious behaviour, such as hewould scorn to practise at home. Thus in all ways the employers mostconscientiously humane are those who can least avoid, in their tastesand their whole manner of living, snubbing him and setting him down inan inferior place. They cannot help it, now that they have thrustthemselves upon him as neighbours. The more they interest themselves inhim, the more glaringly is the difference which separates themselvesfrom him brought out. 

Whether, if the common had remained open, the villagers could still haveheld aloof, at this time of day, from the movements of the outer worldis a question not worth discussion. The enclosure was brought to pass;the keystone was knocked out of the arch; and here are some of theindirect consequences. From a position in which the world'sdistinctions of class and caste were hardly noticed--a position whichwas, so to speak, an island of refuge, where self-respect could bepreserved in preserving the old rough peasant ways--the valley folk havebeen forced into such relations with the world outside the valley as wehave seen. They are no longer a separate set, unclassified, but a gradehas been assigned to them in the classification of society at large, andit is wellnigh the lowest grade of all, for only the pauper and criminalclasses are below them. In this sense, therefore, they are a "degraded"people, though by no fault of their own. Amongst "the masses" is wherethey are counted. Moreover, since they are now, as we have seen, competing against one another for the right to live, none of theconcessions are made to them now that were of old made to the group ofthem, but they count, and are judged, individually, amongst the millionsof the English proletariat. "Inferiority" has come into their lives; itis expected of them to treat almost everybody else as a superior person. But the cruellest indignity of all is that, although we regard them asinferiors, we still look to them to admire and live up to our standards;and they are to conform to our civilization, yet without the income itrequires or the social recognition it should secure. And if they willnot do this willingly, then shall they be coerced, or at least kept inorder, by "temperance" and other "reforming" legislation, and by thepolice. 

XII

THE HUMILIATED

The effects of this "inferiority" which has been thrust upon thevillagers are not exactly conspicuous in any particular direction. As ithas been shown already, the people themselves seem almost unaware of anygrievance in the matter, the change having come upon them too graduallyfor it to be sharply felt. They bear no malice against their employers. You would hardly learn, from anything that they consciously say or do, that in becoming so humiliated they have been hurt in their feelings, orhave found it necessary to change their habits. 

Indeed, the positive alteration in their manners, by which I mean theadoption of new ways in place of old ones, has probably not amounted toa great deal. I admit that I have no means of estimating how much itdoes amount to. During fifty years, in which every cottager must now andthen have become aware of constraint put upon him or her by the superiorattitude of the employing class, it is quite possible that there havebeen innumerable small concessions and adaptations of manner, and thatthese have accumulated into a general change which would surprise us ifit could be measured. But I incline to think that the effects ofclass-pressure have been chiefly negative; that, while employers havebeen adopting new modes of life, all that has happened to the labouringfolk here in the valley is that this or that habit, found inexpedient atlast, has been quietly dropped. A sort of reserve in the village temper, a want of gaiety, a subdued air--this, which one cannot help observing, is probably the shadow cast upon the people from the upraisedmiddle-class. It looks suggestive, too. Yet, upon examining it, onefails to find in it any definite token that would show exactly how andwhere the village temper has been touched, or in what light "superior"persons are regarded in the cottages. The people appear enigmatic. Theykeep their own counsel. Whether they are bewildered or amused at thebehaviour of employers, or alarmed or embittered by it, or actuallyindifferent to it, no sign escapes them when members of the employingclass are by. 

In these circumstances, it is instructive to turn aside for a while fromthe grown-up people of the village, and to consider their children;because the children do not learn about the employing class by directintercourse, but derive from their parents such ideas as they have ofwhat is safe to do, and what is proper, where employing people areconcerned. As soon as this truth is realized, a curious significanceappears in some characteristic habits of the village school boys andgirls. The boys, especially, deserve remark. That they are in general"rough, " "uncivilized, " I suppose might go without saying. It might alsogo without saying, were it not that the comparison turns out to beuseful, that in animal spirits, physical courage, love of mischief andnoise, they are at least a match for middle-class boys who go to thetown grammar-school. I wish I could say that they have an equally goodsense of "playing the game, " an equally strong _esprit de corps_, and soon. Unfortunately, these traditions have hardly reached the villageschool as yet, and perhaps will not easily make their way there, amongstthe children of parents whom the struggle for life compels to be sosuspicious and jealous. The question is, however, beside the point now. Viewed without prejudice, the village boys must be thought quite as goodmaterial as any other English boys; you can see that there is the makingof strong and brave men in them. With similar chances they would not beinferior in any respect to the sons of the middle classes. 

But under existing conditions the two sorts of boys develop some curiousdifferences of habit. Where those from middle-class homes areself-possessed, those from the labourers' cottages are not merely shy, not merely uncouth and lubberly; they grow furtive, suspicious, timid aswild animals, on the watch for a chance to run. Audacious enough atbird's-nesting, sliding, tree-climbing, fighting, and impertinent enoughtowards people of their own kind, they quail before the first challengeof "superiority. " All aplomb goes from them then. It is distressing tosee how they look: with an expression of whimpering rebellion, as thoughthe superior person had unhuman qualities, not to be reckoned on--asthough there were danger in his presence. An incident of a few yearsago, very trumpery in itself, displayed to me in the sharpestdistinctness the contrast between the two orders of boys in thisrespect. In the hedge which parts my garden from the lane there is anut-tree, too tempting to all boys when the nuts are ripe. At thatseason one hears whispered and exclamatory confabulations going on inthe lane, and then large stones go crashing up into the tree, fallingback sometimes within the hedge, where there is a bit of grass and agarden seat. Occasionally, playing the absurd part of irateproperty-owner, I have gone to the gate near by to drive off theoffenders, but have opened it only in time to see a troop of urchins, alarmed by the click of the gate-latch, scurrying away like rabbitsround the bend of the lane. One Sunday afternoon, however, when I lookedout after a stone had fallen nearly on my head, it was to find two boyscalmly waiting for me to approach them. Their school caps showed them tobe two boys of the grammar-school. The interview went comically. Uponbeing told crossly that they were a nuisance, the boys apologized--anact which seemed to put me in the wrong. In my annoyance at that, Ihinted ironically that, in fact, I was a benevolent person, quitewilling to admit boys inside the hedge to pick up nuts, if nuts theyreally must have. Then I turned away. To my astonishment, they took meat my word, followed me into the garden, and calmly began to pick upnuts; while I withdrew, discomfited. I have since smiled to think of theaffair; but I recall it now with more interest, for the sake of thecontrast it affords between middle-class boys and labouring-class boysin exactly similar circumstances. Where the former behave confidently, because they feel safe, the latter are overtaken by panic, and run tocover. 

In this light another curious fact about the village boys gains insignificance, supposing it to be indeed a fact. From the nature of thecase, proof is not possible, but I have a strong impression that, excepting to go to the town, the boys of the village rarely, if ever, stray into neighbouring parishes, or more than a few hundred yards awayfrom their parents' homes. One exception must be noted. In the lonelyand silent fir-woods, which begin in the next valley and stretch awayover ridge and dell for some miles from south-east to south-west, onesometimes comes upon a group of village children--little boys and girlstogether--filling sacks with fir-cones, and pushing an old perambulatorto carry the load. But these are hardly voluntary expeditions; and theboys are always very small ones, while the girls are in charge. Thebigger boys, of from ten to thirteen years old, do not go into thewoods. They play in the roads and pathways, or on the corners of unusedland, and as a rule within sight or call of home. I have never seen anyof them, as I have occasionally seen middle-class boys from the town, rambling far afield in the outlying country, and my belief is that theywould be considerably scared to find themselves in such unfamiliarscenes. 

Assuming that I am right, yet another contrast presents itself. It wasin this very neighbourhood that William Cobbett, as a little boy, playedoff upon the huntsman that trick of revenge which he bragged about inafter-life. For five or six miles across country, over various streams, through woods and heaths and ploughed upland fields, he made his way allalone, dragging his red herring, perfectly confident in himself, neverat a loss to know where he was, but thoroughly familiar with the lie ofthe land most suitable for his game. Of course, not many boys areCobbetts. Yet many of the village boys, even now, would be his match atother games. For here, on the shelving sand-banks beside the stream, Ihave seen them enjoying rough-and-tumble romps like those which thelittle Cobbett lived to think the best part of his education; and theydo it with a recklessness which even he can scarce have surpassed. Butin getting about the country they do not so much as begin to emulatehim. Of course, it is true that now they have to spend their days inschool; true, too, that the enclosures of land throughout theneighbourhood have made wandering less easy in our times; nevertheless, within a few miles there are woods and heath-lands in plenty foradventurous boys, as those of the middle-class are aware; yet those ofthe village never risk the adventure. I can but infer that they areafraid of something, and a moment's thought discloses what they fear. Just as in meddling with my nut-tree, so everywhere they are in dangerof trouble with people of the propertied or employing kind; and behindthese people stands the policeman, and behind the policeman that dimobject of dread called "a summons. " This it is that keeps the villagechildren within the bounds familiar to them, where they know who is who, and what property belongs to which owner, and how far they may riskdoing mischief, and round what corners they may scamper into safety. 

The caution they display is not unnecessary. Somehow, middle-class boysdo not get into trouble with the law; but it happens not infrequentlythat a few little villagers are "pulled up" before a magistrate fortrivial acts of mischief, and if the worst punishment inflicted uponthem is a shilling fine and costs, which their parents pay, that isenough to make "a summons" a very dreadful thing to a little boy. Out ofeighteen shillings a week, his father cannot afford "a shilling andcosts" for a piece of mischief, as the little boy is but too likely tobe shown. 

Children's memories are short, however, and it takes more than anoccasional punishment of two or three to inspire in them all atimorousness so instinctive in character as that of these village boys. At the back of it there must be a more constant and pervasive influence. And, to come to the point at last, I think that the boys are swayed, unwittingly, by an attitude in the grown-up people with whom theylive--an attitude of habitual wariness, not to say fear, in regard toeverything connected with property and employers. This is what makes thetimidity of the village urchins interesting. We may discern in it theexpression of a feeling prevalent throughout the cottages--an unreasonedbut convinced distrust of propertied folk, and a sense of beingunprotected and helpless against their privileges and power. Here, accordingly, is one direction in which class distinction has seriouslyaffected the villagers. It would be an exaggeration to say that theyfeel like outlaws; but they are vaguely aware of constraint imposed uponthem by laws and prejudices which are none too friendly to people oftheir kind. One divines it in their treatment of the village policeman. There is probably no lonelier man in the parish than the constable. Ofcourse he meets with civility, but his company is avoided. One hearshim mentioned in those same accents of grudging caution which thevillagers use in speaking of unfriendly property-owners, as though hebelonged to that alien caste. The cottagers feel that they themselvesare the people whom he is stationed in the valley to watch. 

They feel it; nor can it be denied that there is some excuse for thefeeling. It is true that they far outnumber the employers, so that, other things being equal, from their more numerous ranks there wouldnaturally come a larger number of offenders against the law. But otherthings are not equal. The proportion is not kept. Anyone who studies thepolice-court reports in the local papers will see that, apart from casesof technical offence, like riding a bicycle on the footpath, or keepinga dog without a licence, practically all the proceedings are taken indefence of the privileges and prejudices of the employing classesagainst the employed classes. Clearly the village idea is not whollywrong. In theory, the policeman represents the general public; inpractice, he stands for middle-class decorum and the rights of property;and what the people say is roughly true--there is one law for the rich, and another for the poor. 

But it is only roughly true, and one must get it a little more exact toappreciate the position in which the labouring-folk stand. I am notdisposed to say anything here against the administration of the law bythe justices, when offenders are brought before them; but in the choiceor detection of offenders I must point out that a great deal of respectof persons is shown. Remember what that old man said, who would haveliked to see the fir-woods go up in flames: "'Tis all fenced in, and nowif you looks over the fence you be locked up for it. " That was anexaggeration, of course--a sort of artistic licence, a piece of oratory;yet for him the assertion held more than a grain of truth. The case isthat of the two sorts of boys over again. Where a middle-class man maytake his Sunday walk securely, risking nothing worse than being civillyturned back by a game-keeper, these village men dare not go, unless theyare prepared to answer a summons for "trespassing for an unlawfulpurpose, " or "in search of game. " Let it be admitted that the unlawfulpurpose is sometimes proved; at least, the trespassers are occasionallyfound to have rabbit-wires concealed about their persons. The remarkablething, however, is that they should have been searched in order to makethis discovery. The searching may be legal, for all that I know; yet Ido not seem to see a middle-class man--a shopkeeper from the town, orany employer of labour--submitting to the process, as the cowedlabouring man apparently does. It will be said that the middle-class manis in no fear of such an outrage, because he is not suspect. But that isconceding the greater part of what I wish to demonstrate. Rightly orwrongly, the labouring man is suspect. A distinction of caste is madeagainst him. The law, which pretends to impartiality, sets him in alower and less privileged place than his employers; and he knows it. Inalleging that he might not look over a fence without being locked up forit my old acquaintance merely overstated a palpable truth. People of hisrank--cottage people, labouring people--do, indeed, not dare to wanderin country places anywhere off the public roads. 

Much more might be said on the same lines. Whether inevitably or no, atall events it happens that the march of respectability gives, toregulations which may be quite proper in themselves, a very strongappearance of being directed against the poorer working people. No doubtit is right enough that the brawling of the "drunk and disorderly" onthe highroads should be checked; the public interest demands it; yet theimpression conveyed is that the regulations are enforced more for thepleasure of property-owners than anybody else; that, in fact, middle-class respectability has, so to speak, made this law especiallywith a view to keeping the working classes in order. I am not urgingthat in this there is any substantial grievance; the offence is rarelycommitted by others than labourers, and by them too often. Yet it iswell known that, while a labourer roystering along the road is pouncedupon and locked up, an employer the worse for drink is shepherded homefrom his hotel by the police, and the affair hushed up. Fromcircumstances like these--and they are very common--a suspicion is bredin cottage people that they are not in good odour with the authorities. The law rather tolerates than befriends them. They are not wanted, arenot regarded as equal fellow-citizens with the well-to-do, but areexpected to be quiet, or to keep out of sight. English people thoughthey are, yet, if nobody will employ them so that they can pay rent fora cottage, they have no admitted rights in England--unless it be to goto the workhouse or to keep moving on upon the public road. In endlessways the sense of inequality is impressed upon them. I opened the localpaper lately, and read of four of our young labourers accused of"card-playing. " The game was "Banker, " the policeman told themagistrates--as if gentlemen were likely to know what that meant!--andhe had caught the fellows red-handed, in some as yet unfenced nook ofthe heath. That was how they were in fault. They should not have beenplaying where they could be seen, in the open air; they should havetaken their objectionable game out of sight, into some private house, asthe middle-classes do--and as, I suppose, the policeman himself musthave done in his time, since he knew the game. Unfortunately for thelabouring men, they have no private house available: there is no roomfor a card-party in their cottages; and thus they become subject to lawswhich, as they do not touch the property-owner, seem designed to catchespecially them. For another example of the same insinuation ofinequality, consider the local by-laws, which now forbid the keeping ofpigs within a considerable distance of a dwelling-house. I will not saythat the villager thinks the regulation a wrong one; at any rate heunderstands that it is excused in the interests of public health. But healso knows that it has been introduced since the arrival of middle-classpeople in the parish. They came, and his pigs had to go; so that in hiseyes even the general public health looks like the health of richresidents rather than of poor ones. 

The people display little resentment; they accept their position withequanimity. Nevertheless it drives them in upon themselves. Observingthe conditions, and yielding to them as to something inherent in thenature of things, they strive to keep out of the way of the superiorclasses. They are an aloof population, though not as their ancestorswere. They are fenced out from the country; they cannot with security gointo enclosed wood or coppice; they must keep to the public way, andthere they must behave so as not to disturb the employing classes. Accordingly, all up and down the valley they restrict themselves moreand more soberly to their gardens and cottages, dreading few things somuch as a collision with those impersonal forces which seem always toside with property and against people like them. 

XIII

NOTICE TO QUIT

It might be thought that at least when they are at home the people wouldbe untroubled; yet that is not the case. Influences from the newcivilization reach them in their cottages, and the intrusion is but themore searching for being impersonal. 

It is borne in upon the senses in the shape of sights and soundsproclaiming across the valley that the village is an altered place, thatthe modern world is submerging it, that the old comfortable seclusion isgone. Even the obscurity of winter nights does not veil that truth; forwhere, but a few years ago, the quiet depths of darkness were butemphasized by a few glimmering cottage lights, there is now a morebrilliant sparkling of lit-up villa windows, while northwards the skyhas a dull glare from new road-lamps which line the ridge on its townside. As for the daytime, the labourer can hardly look from his doorwithout seeing up or down the valley some sign or other telling of theinvasion of a new people, unsympathetic to his order. He sees, and hearstoo. As he sweats at his gardening, the sounds of piano-playing come tohim, or of the affected excitement of a tennis-party; or the braying ofa motor-car informs him that the rich who are his masters are on theroad. And though the man should go into his cottage and shut the door, these things must often have for him a sinister meaning which he cannotso easily shut out. There is a vague menace in them. They betoken to allthe labouring people that their old home is no longer quite at their owndisposal, but is at the mercy of a new class who would willingly seetheir departure. 

Perhaps the majority do not feel themselves personally threatened;nevertheless, the situation is disquieting for all. Before theproperty-owners came, and while still the population was homogeneous, asort of continuity in the life of the valley impressed itself upon one'sconsciousness, giving a sense of security. Here amidst the heaths alaborious and frugal people, wise in their own fashion, had their homeand supplied their own wants. Not one of them probably thought of thesignificance of it all, or understood how the village traditions werehis inheritance; not one considered what it meant to him to belong tothe little group of folk and be independent of the whims of strangers. Yet, for all that, there was comfort in the situation. To be so familiaras the people were with the peculiarities of the valley, to appreciatethe usefulness of the wide heath-land, to value the weather, tocomprehend at a glance the doings of the neighbours, and to havefellow-feeling with their motives and hopes and disappointments, was tobe at home most intimately, most safely. But all this is a thing of thepast. To-day, when the labourer looks around, much of what he sees inthe new houses, roads, fences, and so on, has, indeed, been produced byhis own handiwork, but it is a product in the enjoyment of which he hasno share. It has nothing to do with him and his people; on the contrary, it announces the break-up of the traditional industries by which helived, and the disintegration of the society of which he was a member. It follows that a certain suggestiveness which used to dignify the homepursuits of the village is wanting to them now. Instead of being a partof the general thrift of the valley--a not unworthy contribution to thatwhich, in the sum, was all important to the village life--those littlejobs which the labourer does at home, including his garden-work, have norelation now to anything save his private necessities, because now thedominant interests of the valley are those of a different sort of peoplewho care nothing for such homely things. I shall be told that, afterall, this is mere sentiment. But, then, half the comfort of lifeproceeds from those large vague sentiments which lift a man's privatedoings up from meanness into worthiness. No such enrichment, however--nodim sense of sharing in a prosperous and approved existence--can rewardthe labourer's industry in this place at the present time. The cleverwork which, in the village of his equals, would have made himconspicuous and respected, now stamps him as belonging to the leastimportant and least considered section of the population. 

Still, I will waive this point. Assuming--though it is much toassume--that the cottagers have no sentiment in the matter, there areother circumstances in the change which cannot fail to disquiet them. Ihinted just now that the "residential" people would not grieve if thelabouring folk took their departure. Now, this is no figure of speech. Although it is likely that not one cottager in twenty has any real causeto fear removal, there has been enough disturbance of the old familiesto prove that nobody is quite safe. Thus, about two years ago, when somecottage property near to a new "residence" was bought up by the owner ofthe residence, it was commonly said that he had bought it in order toget rid of some of the tenants, whom he disliked for neighbours. Whetheror not that was the real reason I do not know; but certain it is thattwo of the tenants were forthwith turned out--one of them aftertwenty-five years of occupancy. It was not the first case of the kind inthe village, nor yet the last. At the present moment I know of threefamilies who are likely ere long to have to quit. They live in a blockof cottages just beyond the hedge of a substantial house--a block which, it must be owned, is rather an eyesore from there, but which mighteasily be turned into a decent villa, and is actually up for sale forthat purpose. And the dwellers in the substantial house are ferventlyhoping that a buyer of the cottages will soon come forward. They havetold me so themselves. "Of course, " they say, "we shall be sorry for thepoor people to be turned out, but we should like to have nicerneighbours, of our own sort. " So in their own valley these Englishpeople are not safe from molestation. With scarce more care for themthan would be shown by a foreign invader, gentility pursues its ungentleaims. No cottager can feel quite secure. A dim uncertainty haunts thevillage, with noticeable effect upon everybody's activities. For a sortof calculating prudence is begotten of it, which yet is not thrift. Itdissuades the people from working for a distant future. It cuts offhope, benumbs the tastes, paralyzes the aspiration to beautify the homewhich may any day have to be abandoned. 

And in the long run this effect, from which all the people suffer moreor less unconsciously, is more injurious than the actual misfortune ofhaving to move, which, after all, falls upon the few only. Not that Iwould make light of that calamity. Men under its shadow lie awake o'nights, worrying about it. While I am writing here, in a cottage near athand there is a man under notice to quit, who is going through all thepitiful experiences--wondering where in the world he shall take his wifeand children, fearing lest it should have to be into some backyard inthe town, dreading that in that case he will be too far away from hisday's work and have to give it up, and scheming to save enough, from thecost of bread and boots, to pay for a van to move his furniture. It isnot for any fault that he is to go. And indeed he is being well treated;for the owner, who wants to occupy the cottage himself, has waitedmonths because the man cannot find another place. Nevertheless he willhave to go. As a rule, a man under notice to quit is in the position ofstanding by and seeing his home, and his living, and the well-being ofhis family sacrificed to the whim of a superior whom he dares notoppose; and I do not dream of arguing that that is a tolerable positionfor any Englishman to be in. None the less, it is true that these acutetroubles, which fall upon a few people here and there, and presently areleft behind and forgotten, are of less serious import than the injury tothe village at large, caused by the general sense of insecurity. 

The people's tastes are benumbed, I said: their aspirations to beautifytheir homes are paralyzed by the want of permanence in their condition. To make this quite plain, it would be only needful to look at the fewcottages in the valley still inhabited by their owners, and to comparethem with those let to weekly tenants. It seems to be no question ofincome that makes the difference between the two. In several cottagesvery well known to me, the owners are not earning more than fifteenshillings a week--or, including the value of the cottage, twentyshillings; yet the places, in their varied ways, all look comfortableand comely. Fruit-trees, or grape-vines, or roses, are trained to thewalls. The boundary hedges are kept well trimmed; here and theresurvives a box border--product of many years of clipping--or even ayew-tree or two fancifully shaped out. Here and there, too, leading tothe cottage door, is carefully preserved an example of those neatpavements of local stone once so characteristic of this countryside; andin all these things one sees what the average cottager would do if itwere worth while--if he had the heart. Since none of these things, however, can be had without long attention, or, at any rate, withoutskill carefully bestowed in due season, you do not find such thingsdecorating the homes of weekly tenants. The cottages let by the weeklook shabby, slovenly, dingy; the hedges of the gardens are neglected, broken down, stopped up with anything that comes to hand. If it were notfor the fruitful and well-tended vegetable plots, one might oftensuppose the tenants to be ignorant of order, degenerate, brutalized, materialized, so sordid and ugly are their homes. 

Yet it is not for want of taste that they endure these conditions. Amidst the pitiful shabbiness which prevails may be found many littlesigns that the delight in comely things would go far if it dared. Thereis hardly a garden in the village, I think, which does not contain acorner or a strip given over unthriftily, not to useful vegetables, butto daffodils or carnations or dahlias, or to the plants of sweet scentand pleasant names, like rosemary and lavender, and balm, andmignonette. And not seldom a weekly tenant, desirous of beauty, goesfarther, takes his chance of losing his pains; nails up against hisdoorway some makeshift structure of fir-poles to be a porch, sowingnasturtiums or sweet-peas to cover it with their short-lived beauty; orhe marks out under his window some little trumpery border to serveinstead of a box-hedge as safeguard to his flowers. One of thosefamilies whose removal was mentioned above--turned out in the summertimethey were, with loss of garden crops--found refuge in a hovel whichstood right against a public pathway. And, although it was anencroachment, within a week a twelve-inch strip of the pathway was dugup under the cottage eaves, and fenced in with a low fencing of sticksroughly nailed together. Within this narrow space were plantedchrysanthemums rescued from the previous home; and when the fence gaveway--as it did before the chrysanthemums flowered--big stones andbrickbats were laid in its place. Considered as decoration, the resultwas a failure; it was the product of an hour's work in which despair andbitterness had all but killed the people's hope; but that it was done atall is almost enough to prove my point. For further illustration I mayrefer again to that other man mentioned above, who is now under noticeto leave his cottage. Last year he was happy in tending four or fiverose-trees which he had been allowed to bring home from the rubbish-heapof his employer's garden. I remember that when he showed them to me, gloating over them, he tried to excuse himself to me for neglecting hispotatoes in their favour, and I did my best to encourage him and puffhim up with pride. But it was of no use. This summer he is neglectinghis roses, and is wondering if his potatoes will be ripe enough fordigging before he is obliged to move. 

With such things going on, it is not wonderful that the people liveshabbily, meanly, out at elbows. Tastes so handicapped as theirs make noheadway, and, though not dying, sink into disuse. The average cottagerlearns to despise pleasantness and to concentrate upon usefulness. Hischief pride now is in his food-crops, which, if not eaten, can be turnedinto money. Of course, these have their beauty--not undiscerned by thelabourer--but they are not grown for that end, and the thriftier theman, the less time to the consideration of beauty will he give. It is, besides, an imprudence to make a cottage look comely, now that covetouseyes are upon the valley and the people's position there has growninsecure. 

Does it seem a slight thing? Whatever the practical importance of it, the extent of change involved in this hopeless attitude of thevillagers towards their home-places must not be under-rated; for if itcould be viewed in sharp perspective it would appear considerableenough. Let us note the transitions. First the straying squatterssettled here, to cultivate chosen spots of the valley and reduce them toorder. They were not wedded to the place; only if it gave them a chanceof getting food and shelter were they likely to remain. Soon, however, that first uncertainty was forgotten. Their peasant customs fitted theenvironment; there was no danger of molestation; already to theirchildren the valley began to feel like a permanent home. As years wenton that feeling deepened, wrapped the people round in an unthought-ofsecurity, and permitted them, here and there, to go beyond the necessarypeasant crafts and think of what was pleasant as well as necessary. Gardens were trimmed into beauty, grape-vines were grown for the sake ofwine-making, and bees were kept for the sake of honey and mead. In thecottages decent furniture and implements began to accumulate; the womendecorated their men's blouses with pretty smocking; the children weretaught old-fashioned lore because it was old-fashioned and theirinheritance; time-honoured customs of May-day and of Christmas were notignored. So during a few generations the old country thrift and itssimple civilization were kept alive, until the loss of the common madethe old thrift no longer possible and introduced the new. Lastly, andwithin recent years, a new population has come, taking possession, witha new civilization which is by no means simple; and now once more asense of unsettledness is upon the cottagers, although for the most partthey remain here. It is, however, an unsettledness very unlike that ofthe earlier time. Instead of hope in it there is anxiety; instead ofstriking deeper root in the valley, the people's hold grows shallower. The agreeable peasant arts have faded out accordingly. The whole peasantmode of life is all but forgotten. To-day we have here not a distinctgroup of people living by customs which their singular circumstancesjustify, but numerous impoverished families living provisionally fromhand to mouth, because of the possibility of further changes to bethrust upon them. While they wait they still work, yet withoutpleasantness in their lives. As their homes by neglect have grown shabbyand squalid, so their industry has become calculating and sordid. Littleremains to them now but their own good temper to keep their life frombeing quite joyless. 

IV

THE RESULTING NEEDS

XIV

THE INITIAL DEFECT

Keeping pace with the alterations in their circumstances, a great mentaland spiritual destitution has made its appearance amongst the labouringpeople. I say "has made its appearance" because it cannot be whollyattributed to the changes we have been discussing. Those changes havedone their part, certainly. Obliterating the country crafts and cults, breaking down the old neighbourly feelings, turning what was aninteresting economy into an anxious calculation of shillings and pence, and reducing a whole village of people from independence to a positionbordering on servility, the introduction of a new system of thrift mustbear the greater share of the blame for the present plight of thelabourers. Nevertheless, their destitution--their mental and spiritualdestitution--has its roots deeper down, and springs from a grave defectwhich was inherent in the peasant system. It is time to recognize thatfact. In many ways the folk-civilization had served the cottagersexcellently. They had grown up hardy and self-reliant under itsinfluence; clever with their hands, shrewd with their heads, kindly andcheerful in their temper. But one can see now that all this had beenbought very dear. To set against the good qualities that came to lightthere was a stifling of other qualities which were equally good, but hadno chance of development at all under the peasant thrift. 

Especially on the side of mental activity was the people's natural powercramped. I do not mean that they were stupid; it would be an error ofthe first magnitude to suppose anything of the sort. But theconcentration of their faculties on their rural doings left themchildish and inefficient in the use of their brains for other purposes. Mention has been made of the "fatalism" which still prevails in thevillage outlook; but fatalism is too respectable a name for that mereabsence of speculative thought which was characteristic of the peasantkind of people I have known. The interest of their daily pursuits kepttheir minds busy upon matters obvious to the senses, while attention toopinions and ideas was discouraged. For this reason the older men andwomen had seldom if ever indulged in fancies or day-dreams, or troubledabout theories or first principles; and until lately I might have saidthe same of the younger ones too. As for watching themselves--watchingand checking off the actions of their own intelligence--it was what theynever did. A sentiment might arise in them and mellow all their temper, and they would not notice it. The inner meaning of things concerned themvery little. Their conception of cause and effect, or of the constancyof nature, was rudimentary. "Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, " saidan old bricklayer of the village, baffled by some error in hiswork--"ninety-nine times out of a hundred it'll come right same as yousets it out, but not always. " Puzzles were allowed to be puzzling, andleft so; or the first explanation was accepted as final. The "mistis inMarch" sufficiently accounted for the "frostis in May. " Mushrooms wouldonly grow when the moon was "growing. " Even with regard to personaltroubles the people were still as unspeculative as ever. Were they poor, or ill? It merely happened so, and that settled it. Or were they incheerful spirits? Why, so they were; and what more could be said?

It was largely this simplicity of their mental processes that made theolder people so companionable. They were unaccustomed to using certainpowers of the brain which modern people use; nay, they were so unawareof that use as to be utterly unsuspicious of such a thing. To be aslittle psychological as possible, we may say that a modern man's thoughtgoes on habitually at two main levels. On the surface are the subjectsof the moment--that endless procession of things seen or heard or spokenof which make up the outer world; and here is where intercourse with theold type of villager was easy and agreeable. But below that surface themodern mind has a habit of interpreting these phenomena by generalideas or abstract principles, or referring them to imaginations all outof sight and unmentioned; and into this region of thought the peasant'sattention hardly penetrated at all. Given a knowledge of theneighbourhood, therefore, it was easy to keep conversation going with aman of this kind. If you could find out the set of superficial orpractical subjects in which he was interested, and chatter solely onthat plane, all went well. But if you dipped underneath it amongstfancies or generalizations, difficulties arose. The old people had noexperience there, and were out of their depth in a moment. And yet--Imust repeat it--we should be entirely wrong to infer that they werenaturally stupid, unless a man is to be called stupid because he doesnot cultivate every one of his inborn faculties. In that sense we allhave our portion in stupidity, and the peasant was no worse than therest of us. His particular deficiency was as I have described it, andmay be fully explained by his mode of life. For in cow-stall or gardenor cottage, or in the fields or on the heaths, the claim of the momentwas all-absorbing; and as he hurried to thatch his rick before the raincame, or to get his turfs home by nightfall, the ideas which throngedabout his doings crowded out ideas of any other sort. Or if, nothurrying, his mind went dreamy, it was still of peasant things that hedreamed. Of what he had been told when he was a child, or what he hadseen for himself in after-life, his memory was full; and every strokeof reap-hook or thrust of spade had power to entice his intellect alongthe familiar grooves of thought--grooves which lie on the surface andare unconnected with any systematized channels of idea-work underneath. 

So the strong country life tyrannized over country brains, and, apartfrom the ideas suggested by that life, the peasant folk had few ideas. Their minds lacked freedom; there was no escape from the actualenvironment into a world either of imagination or of more scientificunderstanding. Nor did this matter a great deal, so long as theenvironment remained intact. In the absence of what we call"views"--those generalizations about destiny or goodness, or pleasure, or what not, by which we others grope our way through life--the steadypeasant environment, so well known and containing so few surprises, wasitself helpful, precisely because it was so well known. If a man wouldbut give shrewd attention to his practical affairs, it was enough; asubstitute for philosophy was already made for him, to save him thetrouble of thinking things out for himself. His whole mental activityproceeded, unawares, upon a substratum of customary understanding, whichbelonged to the village in general, and did not require to beformulated, but was accepted as axiomatic by all. "Understanding" is thebest word I can find for it. It differed from a philosophy or a belief, because it contained no abstract ideas; thinking or theorizing had nopart in it; it was a sheer perception and recognition of thecircumstances as they were. The people might dispute about details; butthe general object to be striven for in life admitted of nodisagreement. Without giving it a thought, they knew it. There lay thevalley before them, with their little homesteads, their cattle, theirgardens, the common; and connected with all these things a certainold-established series of industries was recognized, leading up to awell-known prosperity. That perception was their philosophy. Theenvironment was understood through and through. And this commonknowledge, existing apart from any individual in particular, servedevery individual instead of a set of private opinions of his own. To getaway from it was impossible, for it was real knowledge; a man'spractical thoughts had to harmonize with it; supported by it, he wassaved the trouble of thinking things out in "systems"; and in fact itwas a better guide to him than thought-out systems could have been, because generations of experience had fitted it so perfectly to thenarrow environment of the valley. So long, therefore, as the environmentremained unaltered, the truth that the people's minds held few ideasupon other subjects, and had developed no method of systematic thinking, was veiled. 

But it has become plain enough now that the old environment is gone. Thenew thrift has laid bare the nakedness of the land. It has found thevillagers unequipped with any efficient mental habits appropriate tothe altered conditions, and shown them to be at a loss for interestingideas in other directions. They cannot see their way any longer. Theyhave no aims; at any rate, no man is sure what his own aims ought to be, or has any confidence that his neighbours could enlighten him. Life hasgrown meaningless, stupid; an apathy reigns in the village--a dullwaiting, with nothing in particular for which to wait. 

XV

THE OPPORTUNITY

Amongst so many drawbacks to the new thrift, one good thing that it hasbrought to the villagers, in the shape of a little leisure, gives us themeans of seeing in more detail how destitute of interests their life hasbecome. It must be owned that the leisure is very scanty. It is soobscured, too, by the people's habit of putting themselves to productivework in it that I have sometimes doubted if any benefit of the kindactually filtered down into their overburdened lives. Others, however, with a more business-like interest in the matter than mine, haverecognized that a new thing has come into the country labourer's life, although they do not speak of it as "leisure. " Mere wasted time is whatit looks like to them. Thus, not long ago, an acquaintance who by nomeans shares my views of these matters was deploring to me thedegenerate state, as he conceived it, of the labourers on certain farmsin which he is interested, a few miles away from this valley. The men, he said, holding their cottages as one of the conditions of employmenton the farms, had grown idle, and were neglecting the cottagegardens--were neglecting them so seriously that, in the interests ofthe estate, he had been obliged to complain to the farmers. Upon myasking for explanations of a disposition so unlike that of the labourersin this parish, many of whom are not content with their cottage gardens, but take more ground when they can get it, my friend said deliberately:"I think food is too cheap. With their fifteen shillings a week the mencan buy all they want without working for it; and the result is thatthey waste their evenings and the gardens go to ruin. "

With this remarkable explanation I am glad to think that I have nothingto do here. The point is that, according to a business man with lifelongexperience in rural matters, country labourers now have time at theirdisposal. Without further question we may accept it as true; thecheapening of produce has made it just possible for labouring men tolive without occupying every available hour in productive work, and inthis one respect they do profit a little by those innovations--the useof machinery, the division of labour, and the free importation offoreign goods--which have replaced the antiquated peasant economy. It isnot necessary nowadays--not absolutely necessary--for the labourer, whenhis day's wage-earning is done, to fall to work again in the evening inorder to produce commodities for his own use. Doubtless if he does so heis the better off; but if he fails to do so he may still live. While hehas been earning money away from home during the day, other men he hasnever met, in countries he has never seen, have been providing for himthe things that he will want at home in the evening; and if these thingshave not been actually brought to his door, they are waiting for him inshops, whence he may get them in exchange for the money he has earned. Some of them, too, are of a quality such as, with the utmost skill andindustry, he never could have produced for himself. Modern artificiallight provides an example. Those home-made rushlights eulogized byGilbert White and by Cobbett may have been well enough in their way, butcheap lamps and cheap paraffin have given the villagers their winterevenings. At a cost of a few halfpence earned in the course of the day'swork a cottage family may prolong their winter day as far into the nightas they please; and that, without feeling that they are wasting theirstore of light, and without being under necessity of spending therescued hours at any of those thrifty tasks which alone would havejustified peasant folk in sitting up late. They have the evening to useat their pleasure. 

If it is said, as my friend interested in land seemed to suggest, thatthey do not know how to use it, I am not concerned to disagree. In fact, that is my own text. On an evening last winter, having occasion to ask aneighbour to do me a service, I knocked at his cottage door, and wasinvited in. The unshaded lamp on the table cast a hard, strong light onthe appointments of the room, and in its glare the family--namely, theman, with his wife, his mother, and his sister--were sitting round thefire. On the table, which had no cloth, the remains of his hottea-supper were not cleared away--the crust of a loaf, a piece ofbacon-rind on a plate, and a teacup showed what it had been. But now hehad finished, and was resting in his shirt-sleeves, nursing his baby. Infact, the evening's occupation had begun. The family, that is to say, had two or three hours to spend--for it was but little past seveno'clock--and nothing to do but to sit there and gossip. An innocentpastime that; I have no fault to find with it, excepting that it had theappearance of being very dull. The people looked comfortable, but therewas no liveliness in them. No trace of vivacity in their faces gave thesmallest reason to suppose that my coming had interrupted any enjoymentof the evening. A listless contentment in being at home together, withthe day's work done and a fire to sit by, was what was suggested by thewhole bearing of the family. Their leisure was of no use to them forrecreation--for "making themselves anew, " that is--or for giving play tofaculties which had lain quiet during the day's work. At the time, however, I saw nothing significant in all this. It was just what othercottage interiors had revealed to me on other winter evenings. Thesurprising, the unexpected thing would have been to find the littlespell of leisure being joyfully used. 

Shall we leave the matter there then? If we do, we shall overlook theone feature in the situation that most particularly deserves attention. For suppose that the cottagers in general do not know what to do withtheir leisure, yet we must not argue that therefore they do not prizeit. Dull though they may seem in it, tedious though I believe they oftenfind it, nevertheless there proceeds from it a subtle satisfaction, asat something gained, in the liberty to behave as they like, in the vaguesense that for an hour or two no further effort is demanded of them. Yawning for bed, half sick of the evening, somewhere in the back oftheir consciousness they feel that this respite from labour, which theyhave won by the day's work, is a privilege not to be thrown away. It ismore to them than a mere cessation from toil, a mere interval betweenmore important hours; it is itself the most important part of theday--the part to which all the rest has led up. 

Nothing of the sort, I believe, was experienced in the village inearlier times. Leisure, and the problem of using it, are new thingsthere. I do not mean that the older inhabitants of the valley never hadany spare time. There were, doubtless, many hours when they "eased off, "to smoke their pipes and drink their beer and be jolly; only, such hourswere, so to speak, a by-product of living, not the usual and expectedconsummation of every day. Accepting them by no means unwillingly whenthey occurred, the folk still were wont normally to reduce them to aminimum, or at least to see that they did not occur too often; as ifspare time, after all, was only a time of waiting until work could beconveniently resumed. So lightly was it valued that most villagers cutit short by the simple expedient of going to bed at six or seveno'clock. But then, in their peasant way, they enjoyed interesting days. The work they did, although it left their reasoning and imaginativepowers undeveloped, called into play enough subtle knowledge and skillto make their whole day's industry gratifying. What should they want ofleisure? They wanted rest, in which to recover strength for taking upagain the interesting business of living; but they approached theirdaily life--their pig-keeping and bread-making, their mowing andthatching and turf-cutting and gardening, and the whole round of countrytasks--almost in a welcoming spirit, matching themselves against itsdemands and proving their manhood by their success. But the modernlabourer's employment, reduced as it is to so much greater monotony, andcarried on for a master instead of for the man himself, is seldom to beapproached in that spirit. The money-valuation of it is the primeconsideration; it is a commercial affair; a clerk going to his officehas as much reason as the labourer to welcome the morning's call towork. As in the clerk's case, so in the labourer's: the act or fruitionof living is postponed during the hours in which the living is beingearned; between the two processes a sharp line of division is drawn;and it is not until the clock strikes, and the leisure begins, that aman may remember that he is a man, and try to make a success of living. Hence the truth of what I say: the problem of using leisure is a new onein the village. Deprived, by the economic changes which have gone overthem, of any keen enjoyment of life while at work, the labourers mustmake up for the deprivation when work is over, or not at all. Naturallyenough, in the absence of any traditions to guide them, they fail. Butself-respect forbids the old solution. To feed and go to bed would be toshirk the problem, not to solve it. 

So much turns upon a proper appreciation of these truths that it will bewell to illustrate them from real life, contrasting the old against thenew. Fortunately the means are available. Modernized people acquaintedwith leisure are in every cottage, while as for the others, the valleystill contains a few elderly men whose lives are reminiscent of theearlier day. Accordingly I shall finish this chapter by giving anaccount of one of these latter, so that in the next chapter thedifferent position of the present-day labourers may be more exactlyunderstood. 

The man I have in mind--I will rename him Turner--belongs to one of theold families of the village, and inherited from his father a cottage andan acre or so of ground--probably mortgaged--together with a horse andcart, a donkey, a cow or two, a few pigs, and a fair stock of the usualrustic tools and implements. Unluckily for him, he inherited notraditions--there were none in his family--to teach him how to use thesepossessions for making a money profit; so that, trying to go on in theold way, as if the world were not changing all round him, he muddledaway his chances, and by the time that he was fifty had no property leftthat was worth any creditor's notice. The loss, however, came too lateto have much effect on his habits. And now that he is but the weeklytenant of a tiny cottage, and owns no more than a donkey and cart and afew rabbits and fowls, he is just the same sort of man that he used tobe in prosperity--thriftless from our point of view, but from thepeasant point of view thrifty enough, good-tempered too, generous to afault, indifferent to discomforts, as a rule very hard-working, yetapparently quite unacquainted with fatigue. 

He gets his living now as a labourer; but, unlike his neighbours, heseems by no means careful to secure constant employment. The regularityof it would hardly suit his temper; he is too keenly desirous of beinghis own master. And his own master he manages to be, in a certaindegree. From those who employ him he obtains some latitude of choice, not alone as to the hours of the day when he shall serve them, but evenas to the days of the week. I have heard him protest: "Monday you saysfor me to come. Well, I dunno about _Monday_--if Tuesday'd suit ye aswell? I wants to do so-and-so o' Monday, if 'tis fine. You see, there'sMr. S---- I bin so busy I en't bin anear him this week for fear _he_should want me up _there_. I _knows_ his grass wants cuttin'. But I'xpects I shall ha' to satisfy 'n Monday, or else p'raps he won't likeit. " Sometimes he takes a day for his own affairs, carting home hop-binein his donkey-cart, or getting heath for some thatching job that hasbeen offered to him. On these terms, while he finds plenty to do inworking intermittently for four or five people in the parish, hepreserves a freedom of action which probably no other labourer in thevillage enjoys. Few others could command it. But Turner's manner is soingratiating that people have a personal liking for him, and it iscertain that his strength and all-round handiness make of him anextremely useful man. Especially does his versatility commend him. Others in the village are as strong as he and as active and willing, butthere are not now many others who can do such a number of differentkinds of work as he can, with so much experienced readiness. 

Among his clients (for that is a more fitting word for them than"employers") there are two or three residents with villa gardens, andalso two of those "small-holders" who, more fortunate than himself(though not more happy, I fancy), have managed to cling to the littleproperties which their fathers owned. Turner, therefore, comes in for anumber of jobs extraordinarily diverse. Thus, during last summer I knewhim to be tending two gardens, where his work ranged from lawn-cutting(sometimes with a scythe) to sowing seeds, taking care of the vegetablecrops, and trimming hedges. But this occupied him only from seven in themorning until five in the afternoon. In the margin outside thesehours--starting at five or earlier and keeping on until dark--he washelping the two small-holders, one after the other, to make their hayand get the ricks built. Then the ricks required thatching, and Turnerthatched them. In the meantime he was getting together a little rick ofhis own for his donkey's use, carrying home in bags the longer grasswhich he had mowed in the rough places of people's gardens or hadchopped off in hedgerows near his home. A month later he was harvestingfor the small-holders, and again there was rick-thatching for him to do. "That's seven I've done, " he remarked to me, on the day when he finishedthe last one. "But didn't the rain stop you this morning?" I asked, forrain had begun heavily about nine o'clock. He laughed. "No. .. . We got'ncovered in somehow. Had to sramble about, but he was thatched afore therain come. "

Later still he was threshing some of this corn with a flail. I heard ofit with astonishment. "A flail?" "Yes, " he said; "my old dad put me toit when I was seventeen, so I _had_ to learn. " He seemed to think littleof it. But to me threshing by hand was so obsolete and antiquated athing as to be a novelty; nor yet to me only, for a friend to whom Imentioned the matter laughed, and asked if I had come across any knightsin armour lately. 

One autumn, when he was doing some work for myself, he begged for a dayor two away in order to take a job at turf-cutting. When he returned onthe third or fourth day, he said: "Me and my nipper" (a lad of aboutsixteen years old) "cut sixteen hundred this time. " Now, lawn-turfs arecut to a standard size, three feet by one, wherefore I remarked: "Why, that's nearly a mile you have cut. " "Oh, is it?" he said. "But it didn'ttake long. Ye see, I had the nipper to go along with the edgin' tool infront of me, and 'twan't much trouble to get 'em up. "

He could not keep on for me regularly. The thought of Mr. S----'s workwaiting to be done fidgeted him. "When I was up there last he wastalkin' about fresh gravellin' all his paths. I said to'n, 'If I was youI should wait anyhow till the leaves is down--they'll make the newgravel so ontidy else. ' So they would, sure. I keeps puttin' it off. ButI shall ha' to go. I sold'n a little donkey in the summer, and he'shoofs'll want parin' again. I done 'em not so long ago. .. . "

So his work varies, week after week. From one job to another up and downthe valley he goes, not listlessly and fatigued, but taking a soberinterest in all he does. You can see in him very well how hisforefathers went about their affairs, for he is plainly a man aftertheir pattern. His day's work is his day's pleasure. It is changefulenough, and calls for skill enough, to make it enjoyable to him. Furthermore, things on either side of it--things he learnt to understandlong ago--make their old appeal to his senses as he goes about, althoughhis actual work is not concerned with them. In the early summer--he hadcome to mow a little grass plot for me--I found him full of a boyishdelight in birds and birds'-nests. A pair of interesting birds hadarrived; at any time in the day they could be seen swooping down fromthe branch of a certain apple-tree and back again to theirstarting-place without having touched the ground. "Flycatchers!" saidTurner exultantly. "I shall ha' to look about. They got their nestsomewhere near, you may be sure o' that! A little wisp o' grasssomewhere in the clunch (fork) of a tree . .. " (his glance wanderedspeculatively round in search of a likely place) "that's where theybuilds. Ah! look now! There he goes again! Right in the clunch you'llfind their nest, and as many as ten young 'uns in'n. .. . Yes, I shall bebound to find where he is afore I done with it. "

The next day, hard by where he was at work, an exclamation of mine drewhim to look at a half-fledged bird, still alive, lying at the foot of anut-tree. "H'm: so 'tis. A young blackbird, " he said pitifully. The nextmoment he had the bird in his hand. "Where can the nest be, then? Up inthat nut? Well, to be sure! Wonders I hadn't seen that afore now. That'sit though, 'pend upon it; right up in the clunch o' that bough. " BeforeI could say a word he was half-way up amongst the branches, long-leggedand struggling, to put the bird back into its nest. 

As he has always lived in the valley, he is full of memories of it, andespecially early memories; recalling the comparative scantiness of itspopulation when he was a boy, and the great extent of the common; andthe warm banks where hedgehogs abounded--hedgehogs which his father usedto kill and cook; and the wells of good water, so few and precious thateach had its local name. For instance, "Butcher's Well" (so-called tothis day, he says) "was where Jack Butcher used to live, what wasshepherd for Mr. Warner up there at Manley Bridge. " At eight years oldhe was sent out on to the common to mind cows; at ten he was thought bigenough to be helpful to his father, at piece-work in the hop-grounds;and in due time he began to go "down into Sussex" with his father andothers for the harvesting. His very first experience there was of a wetAugust, when the men could earn no money and were reduced to living onbread and apples; but other years have left him with happier memories ofthat annual outing. "Old Sussex!" he laughed once in appreciativereminiscence--"Old Sussex! Them old hills! I did use to have a appetitethere! I could eat anything. .. . You could go to the top of a hill andlook down one way and p'raps not see more'n four or five places (housesor farmsteads), and look t'other way and mebbe not be able to see e'er aone at all. Oh, a reg'lar wild, out-o'-th'-way place 'twas. " On thisfarm, to which his gang went year after year, the farmer "didn't _pay_very high--you couldn't expect'n to. But he used to treat us very well. Send out great puddin's for us two or three times a week, and cider, andbread-an'-cheese. .. . Nine rabbits old Fisher the roadman out here says'twas, but I dunno 'bout that, but I _knows_ 'twas as many as seven, thefarmer put into one puddin' for us. There was a rabbit for each man, behow 'twill. In a great yaller basin. .. . " Turner held out his arms toillustrate a large circumference. 

In the time of his prosperity the main of his work was with his ownhorse and cart, so that I know him to have had considerable experiencein that way; and I recollect, too, his being at plough in one of theslanting gardens of this valley, not with his horse--the ground was toosteep for that--but with two donkeys harnessed to a small plough whichhe kept especially for such work. Truly it would be hard to "put himout, " hard to find him at a loss, in anything connected with countryindustry. He spoilt some sea-kale for me once, admitting, however, before he began that he was not very familiar with its management; butthat is the only matter of its kind in which I have proved himinefficient. To see him putting young cabbage-plants in rows is torealize what a fine thing it is to know the best way of going to work, even at such a simple-seeming task as that; and I would not undertake tocount in how many such things he is proficient. 

One day he was telling me an anecdote of his taking honey from anold-fashioned straw beehive; another day the talk was of pruningfruit-trees. I had shown him an apple--the first one to be picked from ayoung tree--and he at once named it correctly as a "Blenheim Orange, "recognizing it by its "eye, " whereupon I asked a question or two, and, finally, if he understood pruning. There came his customary laugh, whilehis eyes twinkled, as if the question amused him, as if I might haveknown that he understood pruning. "Yes, I've done it many's a time. Grape vines, too. " Who taught him? "Oh, 'twas my old uncle made me dothat. He was laid up one time--'twas when I was eighteen year old--andhe says to me: 'You'll ha' to do it. Now's your time to learn. .. . ' Ofcourse he showed me _how_. So 'twas he as showed me how to thatch. .. . Myfather never knowed how to do thatchin', nor anythink else much. He wasmostly hop-ground. He done a little mowin', of course. " Equally ofcourse, the father had reaped and harvested, and kept pigs and cows, anda few odd things besides; nevertheless, being chiefly a wage-earner, "henever knowed much, " and it was to the uncle that the lad owed his besttraining. 

From talk of the uncle, and of the uncle's cows, of which he had chargefor a time, he drifted off to mention a curious piece of old thriftconnected with the common, and practised apparently for some time afterthe enclosure. There was a man he knew in those now remote days who fedhis cows for a part of the year on furze, or "fuzz, " as we call it here. Two acres of furze he had, which he cut close in alternate years, thesecond year's growth making a fine juicy fodder when chopped small intoa sort of chaff. An old hand-apparatus for that purpose--a kind ofchaff-cutting box--was described to me. The same man had a horse, whichalso did well on furze diet mixed with a little malt from the man's ownbeer-brewing. 

To the lore derived from his uncle and others, Turner has added much byhis own observation--not, of course, intentional observationscientifically verified, but that shrewd and practical folk-observation, if I may so call it, by which in the course of generations the ruralEnglish had already garnered such a store of mingled knowledge anderror. So he knows, or thinks he knows, why certain late-bearingapple-trees have fruit only every other year, and what effect on thepotato crop is caused by dressing our sandy soil with chalk or lime; sohe watches the new mole-runs, or puzzles to make out what birds they canbe that peck the ripening peas out of the pods, or estimates the yieldof oats to the acre by counting the sheaves that he stacks, or examinesthe lawn to see what kinds of grass are thriving. About all such mattershis talk is the talk of an experienced man habitually interested in hissubject, and yet it is never obtrusive. The remarks fall from himcasually; you feel, too, that while he is telling you something that henoticed yesterday or years ago his eyes are alert to seize any newdetail that may seem worthy of attention. Details are always really hissubject, for the generalizations he sometimes offers are built on theflimsiest foundation of but one or two observed facts. But I am not nowconcerned with the value of his observations for themselves; the pointis that to him they are so interesting. He is a man who seems to enjoyhis life with an undiminished zest from morning to night. It is doubtfulif the working hours afford, to nine out of ten modern and even"educated" men, such a constant refreshment of acceptable incidents asTurner's hours bring to him. 

He is perhaps the best specimen of the old stock now left in the valley;but it must not be thought that he is singular. Others there are notvery unlike him; and all that one hears of them goes to prove that theold cottage thrift, whatever its limitations may have been, did at leastmake the day's work interesting enough to a man, without his needing tocare about leisure evenings. Turner, for his part, does not value themat all. In the winter he is often in bed before seven o'clock. 

XVI

THE OBSTACLES

Keeping this old-fashioned kind of life in mind as we turn again to themodern labourer's existence, we see at once where the change has comein, and why leisure, from being of small account, has become of so greatimportance. It is the amends due for a deprivation that has beensuffered. Unlike the industry of a peasantry, commercial wage-earningcannot satisfy the cravings of a man's soul at the same time that itoccupies his body, cannot exercise many of his faculties or appeal tomany of his tastes; and therefore, if he would have any profit, anyenjoyment, of his own human nature, he must contrive to get it in hisleisure time. 

In illustration of this position, I will take the case--it is fairlytypical--of the coal-carter mentioned in the last chapter. He is abouttwenty-five years old now; and his career so far, from the time when heleft school, may be soon outlined. It is true, I cannot say what hisfirst employment was; but it can be guessed; for there is no doubt thathe began as an errand-boy, and that presently, growing bigger, he took aturn at driving a gravel-cart to and fro between the gravel-pits andthe railway. Assuming this, I can go on to speak from my own knowledge. His growth and strength came early; I remember noticing him first as apowerful fellow, not more than seventeen or eighteen years old, butalready doing a man's work as a gravel-digger. When that work slackenedafter two or three years, he got employment--not willingly, but becausetimes were bad--at night-work with the "ballast-train" on the railway. Exhausting if not brutalizing labour, that is. At ten or eleven at nightthe gangs of men start off, travelling in open trucks to the part of theline they are to repair, and there they work throughout the night, onwind-swept embankment or in draughty cutting, taking all the weatherthat the nights bring up. This man endured it for some twelve months, until a neglected chill turned to bronchitis and pleurisy, and nearlyended his life. After that he had a long spell of unemployment, and wason the point of going back to the ballast-train as a last resource when, by good fortune, he got his present job. He has been a coal-carter forthree or four years--a fact which testifies to his efficiency. Byhalf-past six o'clock in the morning he has to be in the stables; thencomes the day on the road, during which he will lift on his back, intothe van and out of it, and perhaps will carry for long distances, nineor ten tons of coal--say, twenty hundredweight bags every hour; byhalf-past five or six in the evening he has put up his horse for thenight; and so his day's work is over, excepting that he has about a mileto walk home. 

Of this employment, which, if the man is lucky, will continue until heis old and worn-out, we may admit that it is more useful by far--to thecommunity--than the old village industries were wont to be. Concentratedupon one kind of effort, it perhaps doubles the productivity of a day'swork. But just because it is so concentrated it cannot yield to the manhimself any variety of delights such as men occupied in the old way werewont to enjoy. It demands from him but little skill; it neither requireshim to possess a great fund of local information and useful lore, noryet takes him where he could gather such a store for his own pleasure. The zest and fascination of living, with the senses alert, the tastesawake, and manifold sights and sounds appealing to his happyrecognition--all these have to be forgotten until he gets home and isfree for a little while. Then he may seek them if he can, using art orpastimes--what we call "civilization"--for that end. The two hours or soof leisure are his opportunity. 

But after a day like the coal-carter's, where is the man that could evenbegin to refresh himself with the arts, or even the games, ofcivilization? For all the active use he can make of them those sparehours of his do not deserve to be called leisure; they are the faggedend of the day. Slouching home to them, as it were from under ten tonsof coal, he has no energy left for further effort. The community hashad all his energy, all his power to enjoy civilization; and has paidhim three shillings and sixpence for it. It is small wonder that heseems not to avail himself of the opportunity, prize it though he may. 

Yet there is still a possibility to be considered. Albeit any active useof leisure is out of the question, is he therefore debarred from a moretranquil enjoyment? He sits gossiping with his family, but why shouldthe gossip be listless and yawning? Why should not he, to say nothing ofhis relations, enjoy the refreshment of talk enlivened by the play ofpleasant and varied thoughts? As everyone knows, the actual topic ofconversation is not what makes the charm; be what it may, it will stillbe agreeable, provided that it goes to an accompaniment of ideas tooplentiful and swift to be expressed. Every allusion then extends theinterest of it; reawakened memories add to its pleasure; if the mindsengaged are fairly well furnished with ideas, either by experience or byeducation, the intercourse between them goes on in a sort of luminousmedium which fills the whole being with contentment. Supposing, then, that by education, or previous experience, the coal-carter's mind hasbeen thus well furnished, his scanty leisure may still compensate himfor the long dull hours of his wage-earning, and the new thrift willafter all have made amends for the deprivation of the old peasantenjoyments. 

But to suppose this is to suppose a most unlikely thing. Previousexperience, at any rate, has done little for the man. The peasantsthemselves were better off. Compare his chances, once more, with thoseof a man like Turner. From earliest childhood, Turner's days and nightshave been bountiful to him in many-coloured impressions. At the outsethe saw and had part in those rural activities, changeful, accomplished, carried on by many forms of skill and directed by a vast amount oftraditional wisdom, whereby the country people of England had for agessupported themselves in their quiet valleys. His brain still teems withrecollections of all this industry. And then to those recollections mustbe added memories of the scenes in which the industry went on--the widelandscapes, the glowing cornfields, the meadows, woods, heaths; andlikewise the details of barn and rick-yard, and stable and cow-stall, and numberless other corners into which his work has taken him. Toanyone who understands them, those details are themselves like aninteresting book, full of "idea" legible everywhere in the shapes whichcountry craftsmanship gave to them; and Turner understands them throughand through. Nor is this all. If not actual adventure and romance, stillmany of the factors of adventure and romance have accompanied himthrough his life; so that it is good even to think of all that he hasseen. He has had experience (travelling down to Sussex) of the deadsilence of country roads at midnight under the stars; has known theAugust sunrise, and the afternoon heat, and the chilly moonlight, highup on the South Downs; and the glint of the sunshine in apple-orchardsat cider-making time; and the grey coming of the rain that urges a manto hurry with his thatching; and the thickening of the white winter fogacross the heaths towards night-fall, when wayfarers might miss thetrack and wander all night unless they knew well what they were about. Of such stuff as this for the brain-life to feed upon there has beengreat abundance in Turner's career, but of such stuff what memories canthe coal-carter have?

Already in his earliest childhood the principal chances were gone. Thecommon had been enclosed; no little boys were sent out to mind cowsthere all day, and incidentally to look for birds'-nests and acquaintthemselves with the ways of the rabbits and hedgehogs and butterfliesand birds of the heath. Fenced-in property, guarded by the Policeman andthe Law, restricted the boy's games to the shabby waste-places of thevalley, and to the footpaths and roads, where there was not much for achild to do or to see. At home, and in the homes of his companions, thenew thrift was in vogue; he might not watch the homely cottage doings, and listen to traditional talk about them, and look up admiringly atable men and women engaged upon them, for the very good reason that nosuch things went on. Men slaving at their gardens he might see, andwomen weary at their washing and mending, amid scenes of little dignityand much poverty and makeshift untidiness; but that was all. Thecoherent and self-explanatory village life had given place to a halfblind struggle of individuals against circumstances and economicprocesses which no child could possibly understand; and it was with thepitiful stock of ideas to be derived from these conditions that thecoal-carter passed out of childhood, to enter upon the wage-earningcareer which I have already outlined. 

I need not spend much time in discussing that career as a source ofideas. From first to last, and with the coal-carting period thrown in, monotony rather than variety has been the characteristic of it. I do notsay that it has been quite fruitless. There are impressions to bederived, and intense ones probably, from working all day against the"face" of a gravel-pit, with the broken edge of the field up above one'shead for horizon; and from the skilled use of pick and shovel; and fromthe weight of the wheelbarrow full of gravel as one wheels it along asagging plank. That is something to have experienced; as it is to havesweated at night in a railway-cutting along with other men under the eyeof a ganger, and to have known starlight, or rain, or frost, or fog, ortempest meanwhile. It is something, even, to see the life of the roadsyear after year from the footboard of a coal-van, and to be in chargeof a horse hour after hour; but I am talking now of ideas which mightgive buoyancy and zest to the gossip beside a man's fireside in theevening when he is tired; and I think it unnecessary to argue that, inregard to providing this kind of mental furniture, the coal-carter'sexperience of life cannot have done great things for him. It has beenpoverty-stricken just where the peasant life was so rich; it has left agreat deficiency, which could only have been made good by an educationintentionally given for that end. 

But it goes almost without saying that the man's "education" did verylittle to enrich his mind. The ideas and accomplishments he picked up atthe elementary school between his fourth and fourteenth years were ofcourse in themselves insufficient for the needs of a grown man, and itwould be unfair to criticize his schooling from that standpoint. Itsdefect was that it failed to initiate him into the inner significance ofinformation in general, and failed wholly to start him on the path oflearning. It was sterile of results. It opened to him no view, no vista;set up in his brain no stir of activity such as could continue after hehad left school; and this for the reason that those simple items ofknowledge which it conveyed to him were too scrappy and too few to beginrunning together into any understanding of the larger aspects of life. Afew rules of arithmetic, a little of the geography of the BritishIslands, a selection of anecdotes from the annals of the ancient Jews;no English history, no fairy-tales or romance, no inkling of theinfinities of time and space, or of the riches of human thought; butmerely a few "pieces" of poetry, and a few haphazard and detachedobservations (called "Nature Study" nowadays) about familiarthings--"the cat, " "the cow, " "the parsnip, " "the rainbow, " and soforth--this was the jumble of stuff offered to the child's mind--ajumble to which it would puzzle a philosopher to give coherence. Andwhat could a child get from it to kindle his enthusiasm for thatcivilized learning in which, none the less, it all may have its place?When the boy left school his "education" had but barely begun. 

And hardly anything has happened since then to carry it farther, although once there seemed just a chance of something better. During twosuccessive winters the lad, being then from sixteen to seventeen yearsold, went to a night-school, which was opened for twenty-six weeks ineach "session, " and for four hours in each week. But the hope provedfallacious. In those hundred and four hours a year--hours which cameafter a tiring day's work--his brain was fed upon "mensuration" and "thescience of horticulture, " the former on the chance that some day hemight want to measure a wall for paper-hanging or do some other job ofthe sort, and the latter in case fate should have marked him out for anursery-gardener, when it would be handy to know that germinating seedsbegin by pushing down a root and pushing up a leaf or two. This gives anotion of the sort of idea the luckless fellow derived from thenight-school. I do not think that the joinery-classes at present beingheld in the night-school had begun in his time; but supposing that healso learnt joinery, he might, now that he is a man, add thoughts ofmortices and tenons and mitre-joints to his other thoughts about wallareas and germinating seeds. Of course, all these things--like Jewishhistory or English geography--are worth knowing; but again it is true, of these things no less than of the childish learning acquired at theday-school, that whatever their worth may be to the people concerned toknow them, they were very unlikely to set up in this young man's brainany constructive idea-activity, any refreshing form of thought thatwould enrich his leisure now, or give zest to his conversation. Theywere odds and ends of knowledge; more comparable to the numberless oddsand ends in which peasants were so rich than to the flowing and luminousidea-life of modern civilization. 

Adequate help having thus failed to reach the man from any source at anytime of his life, it cannot be surprising if now the evening'sopportunity finds him unprepared. He is between two civilizations, oneof which has lapsed, while the other has not yet come his way. And whatis true of him is true of the younger labouring men in general. Inbread-and-cheese matters they are perhaps as well off as theirforefathers in the village, but they are at a disadvantage in the matterof varied and successful vitality. The wage-earning thrift which hasincreased their usefulness as drudges has diminished their effectivenessas human beings; for it has failed to introduce into their homes thoseenlivening, those spirit-stirring influences which it denies to themwhen they are away from home doing their work. Hence a strange thing. The unemployed hours of the evening, which should be such a boon, are atime of blank and disconsolate tediousness, and when the longer days ofthe year come round many a man in the valley who ought to be glad of hisspare time dodges the wearisome problem of what to do with it by puttinghimself to further work, until he can go to bed without feeling that hehas been wasting his life. Yet that is really no solution of theproblem. It means that the men are trying to be peasants again, becausethey can discover no art of living, no civilization, compatible with thenew thrift. 

Of course it is true that they are handicapped by the lowness of thewages they receive. However much time one may have, it would be all butimpossible to follow up modern civilization without any of itsapparatus, in the shape of books and musical instruments, and thecomfort of seclusion in a spare room; and none of these advantages canbe bought out of an income of eighteen shillings a week. That is plainlythe central difficulty--a difficulty which, unless it can be put right, condemns our commercial economy as wholly inadequate to the needs oflabouring people. Supposing, however, that this defect could be suddenlyremedied; supposing, that is, that by some miracle wages could be soadjusted as to put the labourer in command of the apparatus ofcivilization; still, he could not use the apparatus without a personaladjustment. He is impoverished, not in money only, but also indevelopment of his natural faculties, since the old village civilizationhas ceased to help him. 

XVII

THE WOMEN'S NEED

If, while the common was still open, very few even of the men of thevillage troubled about regular employment, we may well believe thatthere were still fewer regular wage-earners amongst the women. I do notmean that wage-earning was a thing they never did. There was not a womanin the valley, perhaps, but had experience of it at hay-making andharvesting, while all would have been disappointed to miss thehop-picking. But these occasional employments had more resemblance toholidays and outings than they had to constant work for a living. 

As the new thrift gradually established itself, the younger women atleast had to alter their ways. For observe what had happened. A numberof men, once half-independent, but now wanting work constantly, had beenforced into a market where extra labour was hardly required; and itneeds no argument to prove that, under such conditions, they were notonly unable to command high wages, but were often unemployed. Ofnecessity, therefore, the women were obliged to make up the week'sincome by their own earnings. The situation, in fact, was similar tothat which had been produced in earlier times and in other parishes bythe old Poor Law, when parish pay enabled men to work for less than aliving wage; only now the deficiency was made up, not at the expense ofemployers and ratepayers, but at the expense of women and girls. 

But, though becoming wage-earners, the women missed the first advantagethat wage-earners should enjoy--namely, leisure time. After all, the newthrift had but partially freed them from their old occupations. Theymight buy at a shop many things which their mothers had had to make; butthere was no going to a shop to get the washing and scrubbing done, thebeds made, the food cooked, the clothes mended. All this remained to thewomen as before. When they came home from the fields--at first it wasprincipally by field-work that they earned wages--it was not to be atleisure, but to fall-to again on these domestic doings, just as if therehad been no change, just as if they were peasant women still. 

And yet, though this work had not changed, there was henceforth a vastdifference in its meaning to the women. To approach it in the truepeasant or cottage woman's temper was impossible; nor in doing it mightthe labourer's wife enjoy half the satisfaction that had rewarded thefatigue of her mother and grandmother. Something dropped away from itthat could not be replaced when the old conditions died out. 

To discover what the "something" was, one need not idealize those oldconditions. It would be a mistake to suppose that the peasant economy, as practised in this valley, was nearly so good a thing for women as itwas for the other sex; a mistake to think that their life was all honey, all simple sweetness and light, all an idyll of samplers and geraniumsin cottage windows. On the contrary, I believe that very often it grewintensely ugly, and was as narrowing as it was ugly. The women sawnothing, and learnt nothing, of the outer world; and, in their ownworld, they saw and learnt much that was ill. All the brutalitiesconnected with getting a living on peasant terms tended to coarsenthem--the cruelties of men to one another, the horrors that had to beinflicted on animals, the miseries of disease suffered by ignorant humanbeings. Their perpetual attention to material cares tended to make themmaterialized and sordid; they grew callous; there was no room tocultivate delicacy of imagination. All this you must admit into thepicture of the peasant woman's life, if you would try to see it fairlyon the bad side as well as on the good side. Still, a good side therewas, and that it was far oftener in evidence than the other I am wellpersuaded, when I remember the older village women who are dead now. They, so masculine in their outlook, yet so true-hearted and, now andthen, so full of womanly tenderness and high feeling, could not havebeen the product of conditions that were often evil. And one merit inparticular must be conceded to the old style of life. Say that thewomen's work was too incessant, and that some of it was distinctly illto do; yet, taken as a whole, it was not uninteresting, and it was justthat wholeness of it that made all the difference. The most tiresomeduties--those domestic cares which were destined to become so irksome towomen of a later day--were less tiresome because they were parts of awhole. Through them all shone the promise of happier hours to be won bytheir performance. 

For although in this rough valley women might not achieve the finersuccesses of cottage folk-life, where it led up into gracefulness andserenity, in a coarser fashion the essential spirit of pride in capabledoing was certainly theirs. They could, and did, enjoy the satisfactionof proficiency, and win respect for it from their neighbours. If theywere not neat, they were very handy; if there was no superlative finishabout their work, there was soundness of quality, which they knew wouldbe recognized as so much to their credit. Old gossip bears me out. Conceive the nimble and self-confident temper of those two cottagewomen--not in this village, I admit, but in the next one to it, and thething was quite possible here--who always planned to do their washing onthe same day, for the pleasure of seeing who had the most "pieces, " andthe best, to hang out on the clothes-lines. The story must be seventyyears old, and I don't know who told it me; but it has always seemed tome very characteristic of the good side of cottage life, whether onethinks of the eager rivalry itself in the gardens, where the whiteclothes flapped, or of the long record implied in it of carefulhousewifery and quiet needlework. This spirit of joy in proficiency musthave sweetened many of the cottage duties, and may well have run throughthem all. When a woman treated her friends to home-made wine atChristmas, she was exhibiting to them her own skill; when she cut up theloaf she had baked, or fried the bacon she had helped to cure, the goodresult was personal to herself; the very turf she piled on the fire hada homely satisfaction for her, because, cut as it was by her husband'sown tools, and smelling of the neighbouring heath as it burnt, it wassuggestive of the time-honoured economies of all the valley. In this wayanother comfort was added to that of her own more personal pleasure. Forthere was hardly a duty that the old-time village woman did, but wasrelated closely to what the men were doing out of doors, and harmonizedwith the general industry of her people. She may be figured, almost, asthe member of a tribe whose doings explained all her own doings, and towhose immemorial customs her scrubbing and washing belonged, notunworthily. Her conscience was in the work. From one thing to anothershe went, now busily at a pleasant task, now doggedly at a wearisomeone, and she knew no leisure; but at every point she was supported bywhat we may call the traditional feeling of the valley--nay, of thewhole countryside--commending her perhaps; at any rate, fullyunderstanding her position. To be like her mother and her grandmother;to practise the time-honoured habits, and to practise them efficiently, was a sort of religious cult with her, in the same way as it is nowadayswith women of a certain position not to be dowdy. The peasant-cottager'swife could never think of herself as a mere charwoman or washerwoman;she had no such ignoble career. She was Mrs. This, or Dame That, with arecognized place in the village; and all the village traditions were herpossession. The arts of her people--the flower-gardening, the songs andold sayings and superstitions, the customs of Harvest-time andChristmas--were hers as much as anybody's; if the stress of work kepther from partaking in them, still she was not shut out from them byreason of any social inferiority. And so we come back to the point atissue. House-drudgery might fill the peasant woman's days and years, andyet there was more belonging to it. It was the core of a fruit: theskeleton of something that was full of warm life. A larger existencewrapped it in, and on the whole a kindlier one. 

In view of all this it is easy to see why the house-duties can nolonger be approached in the old temper, or yield their formersatisfaction while they are being done. The larger existence has beenstripped away from them. They do not lead up to happier, moreinteresting, duties; they are not preparatory to pleasantness. Thewashing and scrubbing, the very cooking and needlework, are but so muchtrouble awaiting a woman when she gets up in the morning and when shecomes home tired at night; they spoil the leisure that wage-earningshould win, and they are undertaken, not with the idea of getting on tosomething productive, something that would make the cottage a moreprosperous home, but solely to keep it from degenerating into anentirely offensive one. There is no hope surrounding these doings. 

Nor do they fail only because they have become dissociated frompleasanter work. Even the best of them are actually less interesting inthemselves. Look, for instance, at cooking. That cheap and coarse foodwhich women now buy because its coarseness makes it cheap is of aquality to discourage any cook; it is common to the village--the roughrations of the poor; and the trumpery crocks and tins, the bad coal, andworse fireplaces, do nothing to make the preparation of it moreagreeable. With needlework it is the same story: commercial thrift hasdegraded that craft. She must be an enthusiast indeed who would expendany art of the needle upon the shabby second-hand garments, or theshoddy new ones, which have to content the labourer's wife. And if thefamily clothes are not good to make or to mend, neither are they good towash, or worth displaying on the clothes-lines in the hope of excitingenvy in neighbours. 

Not at first, but in due time, inefficiency was added to the othercauses which tended to make housework unpalatable to the women, and ofno use to them as an uplifting experience. The inefficiency could hardlybe avoided. The mothers, employed in the fields, had but little chanceof teaching their daughters; and these daughters, growing up, to marryand to follow field-work themselves, kept their cottages as best theycould, by the light of nature. In not a few cases all sense of an art ofwell-doing in such matters was lost, and the home became a place tosleep in, to feed in; not a place in which to try to live well. Perhapsthe lowest ebb was reached some fifteen or twenty years ago. By thenthat feeling of belonging intimately to the countryside and sharing itstraditions had died out, and nothing had come to replace it. For allpractical purposes there were no traditions, nor were there any truecountry-folk living a peculiar and satisfying life of their own. Thewomen had become merely the "hands" or employées of farmers, strugglingto make up money enough every week for a wretched shopping. Withhealth, a joking humour, and the inevitable habit of self-reliance, theypreserved a careless good-temper, and they had not much time to realizetheir own plight; but it was, for all that, a squalid life that many ofthem led, a neglected life. Only in a very few cottages did there lingerany serviceable memory of better things. 

Of late years some recovery is discernible. Field-work, which fostered ablowsy carelessness, has declined, and at the same time the arrival of"residents" has greatly increased the demand for charwomen andwasherwomen. The women, therefore, find it worth while to cultivate acertain tidiness in their persons, which extends to their homes. It istrue I am told that their ideas of good housework are often rudimentaryin the extreme; that the charwoman does not know when to change herscrubbing water; that the washerwoman is easily satisfied with quitedubious results; and I can well believe it. The state of the cottages isbetrayed naļvely by the young girls who go from them into domesticservice. "You don't seem to like things sticky, " one of these girlsobserved to a mistress distressed by sticky door-handles one day andsticky table-knives the next day. That remark which Richard Jefferiesheard a mother address to her daughter, "Gawd help the poor missus asgets hold o' _you_!" might very well be applied to many and many achild of fourteen in this valley, going out, all untrained, to her first"place"; but these things, indicating what has been and is, do notaffect the truth that a slight recovery has occurred. It is an openquestion how much of the recovery is a revival of old ideas, called intoplay again by new forms of employment. Perhaps more of it is due toexperience which the younger women now bring into the valley when theymarry, after being in comfortable domestic service outside the valley. In other words, perhaps middle-class ideas of decent house-work are atlast coming in, to fill the place left empty by the obsolete peasantideas. 

May we, then, conclude that the women are now in a fair way to do well;that nothing has been lost which those middle-class ideas cannot makegood? In my view the circumstances warrant no such conclusion. Considerwhat it is that has to be made good. It is something in the nature of acivilization. It is the larger existence which enwrapped the peasantwoman's house-drudgery and made it worth while. A good domestic methodis all very well, and the middle-class method is probably better thanthe old method; but alike in the peasant cottages, and now inmiddle-class homes, we may see in domestic work a nucleus only--the coreof a fruit, the necessary framework of a more acceptable life. With thecottage women in the old days that work favoured such developments ofability and of character as permitted the women to look withcomplacency upon women bred in other ways. They experienced nohumiliating contrasts. Their household drudgery put within their reachthe full civilization of which it was an organic part. But who canaffirm as much of their household drudgery to-day? Who can pretend thatthe best accomplishment of it on middle-class lines admits the cottagewoman into the full advantages of middle-class civilization, and enablesher to look without humiliation upon the accomplishments of well-to-dowomen? I know that villa ladies and district visitors cling to some suchbelief, but the notion is false, and may be dismissed without argument, until the ladies can show that they owe all their own refinement to theinspiring influences of the washing-tub, and the scrubbing-pail, and thekitchen-range. The truth is that middle-class domesticity, instead ofsetting cottage women on the road to middle-class culture of mind andbody, has side-tracked them--has made of them charwomen and laundresses, so that other women may shirk these duties and be "cultured. "

Of course, their wage-earning and their home-work are not the onlysources from which ideas that would explain and beautify life might beobtained by them. The other sources, however, are of no great value. Atschool, where (as we have seen) the boys get little enough generalinformation, the girls have hitherto got less, instruction in needleworkand cookery being given to them in preference to certain more bookishlessons that the boys get. They leave school, therefore, intellectuallymost ignorant. Then, in domestic service, again it is in cookery andthat sort of thing that they are practised; there may be culture ofthought and taste going on elsewhere in the house, but they are notadmitted to it. Afterwards, marrying, and confronted with the problem ofmaking both ends meet on eighteen shillings a week, they get experienceindeed of many things, and, becoming mothers, they learn invaluablelessons; yet still the _savoir vivre_ that should make up for the oldpeasant cult, the happy outlook, the inspiring point of view, is notattained. Their best chance is in the ideas and knowledge they may pickup from their husbands, and if from them they do not learn anything ofthe best that has been thought and said in the world, they do not learnit. Of their husbands, in this connection, there will be somethingfurther to be said presently; in the meantime I may leave it to thereader to judge whether the cottage woman's needs, since the peasantsystem broke down, are being well met. 

But I must not leave it to be inferred that the women, thus strandedbetween two civilizations, are therefore degraded or brutalized. Fromrepeated experience one knows that their sense of courtesy--of goodmanners as distinct from merely fashionable or cultured manners--is verykeen: in kindness and good-will they have nothing to learn fromanybody, and most of their "superiors" and would-be teachers might learnfrom them. Nor would I disparage their improved housekeeping, as thoughit had no significance. It may open no doorway for them intomiddle-class civilization, but I think it puts their spirits, as itwere, on the watch for opportunities of personal development. I judge bytheir looks. An expression, not too often seen elsewhere, rests in theeyes of most of the cottage women--an expression neither self-complacentnor depressed, nor yet exactly docile, though it is near to that. Theinterpretation one would put upon it depends on the phrases one is wontto use. Thus some would say that the women appear to be reaching outtowards "respectability" instead of the blowsy good-temper bred offield-work; others, more simply, but perhaps more truly, that they aredesirous of being "good. " But whatever epithet one gives it, there isthe fine look: a look hardly of expectancy--it is not alert enough forthat--but rather of patient quietness and self-possession, the innermostspirit being held instinctively unsullied, in that receptive state inwhich a religion, a brave ethic, would flourish if the seeds of such athing could be sown there. A hopeful, a generous and stimulatingoutlook--that is what must be regained before the loss of the peasantoutlook can be made good to them. They are in want of a view of lifethat would reinstate them in their own--yes, and in otherpeople's--estimation; a view of social well-being, not of the villageonly, but of all England now, in which they can hold the position properto women who are wives and mothers. 

And this, vague though it is, shows up some of the more pressing needsof the moment. Above all things the economic state of the cottage-womenrequires improvement. There must be some definite leisure for them, andthey must be freed from the miserable struggle with imminentdestitution, if they are to find the time and the mental tranquillityfor viewing life largely. But leisure is not all. They need, further, aneducation to enable them to form an outlook fit for themselves; fornobody else can provide them with such an outlook. The middle-classescertainly are not qualified to be their teachers. It may be said at oncethat the attempts of working-women here and there to emulate women ofthe idle classes are of no use to themselves and reflect small credit onthose they imitate. In this connection some very curious things--theproduct of leisure and no outlook--are to be seen in the village. Thatobjectionable yet funny cult of "superiority, " upon which the "resident"ladies of the valley spend so much emotion, if not much thought, has itsdisciples in the cottages; and now and then the prosperous wife ordaughter of some artisan or other gives herself airs, and does not"know, " or will not "mix with, " the wives and daughters of merelabourers in the neighbouring cottages. Whether women of this aspiringtype find their reward, or mere bitterness, in the patronage of stillhigher women who are intimate with the clergy is more than I can say. The aspiration has nothing to do with that "religion, " that new ethic, which I have just claimed to be the thing ultimately needed, before theloss of the peasant system can be made up to the women. 

XVIII

THE WANT OF BOOK-LEARNING

Some light was thrown on the more specific needs of the village by anexperiment in which I had a share from ten to thirteen years ago. Theabsence of any reasonable pastime for the younger people suggested it. At night one saw boys and young men loafing and shivering under the lampoutside the public-house doors, or in the glimmer that shone across theroad from the windows of the one or two village shops. They had nothingto do there but to stand where they could just see one another and tryto be witty at one another's expense, or at the expense of anypassers-by--especially of women--who might be considered safe game: thatwas their only way of spending the evenings and at the same timeenjoying a little human companionship. True, the County Council hadlately instituted evening classes for "technical education" in theelementary schools; but these classes were of no very attractive nature, and at best they occupied only two evenings a week. As many as twenty orfive-and-twenty youths, however, attended them, glad of the warmth andlight, though bored by the instruction. They were mischievous andinattentive; they kept close watch on the clock, and as soon ashalf-past nine came they were up and off helter-skelter, as if thegloomy precincts of the shop or the public-house were, after all, lessirksome than the night-school. 

There was no recreation whatever for the growing girls, none for thegrown-up women; nothing but the public-house for the men, unless oneexcepts the two or three occasions during the winter when the morewell-to-do residents chose to give an entertainment in the schoolroom, and admitted the poor into the cheaper seats. Everybody knows the natureof these functions. There were readings and recitations; young ladiessang drawing-room songs or played the violin; tableaux were displayed ora polite farce was performed; a complimentary speech wound up theentertainment; and then the performers withdrew again for several monthsinto the aloofness of their residences, while the poor got through theirwinter evenings as best they could, in their mean cottages or under thelamp outside the public-house. 

It was in full view of these circumstances that an "Entertainment Club"was started, with the idea of inducing the cottage people to helpthemselves in the matter of recreation instead of waiting until itshould please others to come and amuse them. I am astonished now tothink how democratic the club contrived to be. In the fortnightlyprogrammes which were arranged the performers were almost exclusivelyof the wage-earning sort, and offers of help from "superior people" werefirmly declined. And for at least one, and, I think, two winters, theexperiment was wildly successful--so successful that, to the best of myrecollection, the "gentry" were crowded out, and gave no entertainmentsat all. But the enthusiasm could not last. During the third winter decayset in, and early in the fourth the club, although with funds in hand, ceased its activities, leaving the field open, as it has since remained, to the recognized exponents of leisured culture. 

The fact is, it died of their culture, or of a reflection of it. At thefirst nobody had cared a straw about artistic excellence. The homely orgrotesque accomplishments of the village found their way surprisingly onto a public platform, and were not laughed to scorn; anyone who couldsing a song or play a musical instrument--it mattered not what--waswelcomed and applauded. But how could it go on? The people able to doanything at all were not many, and when their repertory of songs learntby ear was exhausted, there was nothing new forthcoming. Gradually, therefore, the club began to depend on the few members with a smatteringof middle-class attainments; and they, imitating the rich--asking forpiano accompaniments to their singing, and so on--at the same time gavethemselves airs of superiority to the crowd. And that was fatal. Theless cultivated behaved in the manner usual to them where there is anyunwarrantable condescension going--that is to say, they kept out of theway of it, until, finally, the performers and organizers had the clubalmost to themselves. From the outset the strong labouring men hadcontemptuously refused to have anything to do with what was often, Iadmit, a foolish and "gassy" affair; but their wives and sons anddaughters had been very well pleased, until the taint of superioritydrove them away. The club died when its democratic character was lost. 

Yet, though I was glad to have done with it, I have never regretted theexperience. It is easy now to see the absurdity of my idea, but at thattime I knew less than I do now of the labouring people's condition, andin furthering the movement I entertained a shadowy hope of findingamongst the illiterate villagers some fragment or other of primitiveart. It is almost superfluous to say that nothing of the sort was found. My neighbours had no arts of their own. For any refreshment of that kindthey were dependent on the crumbs that fell from the rich man's table, or on such cheap refuse as had come into the village from Londonmusic-halls or from the canteens at Aldershot. Street pianos in theneighbouring town supplied them with popular airs, which theyreproduced--it may be judged with what amazing effect--on flute oraccordion; but the repertory of songs was filled chiefly from thesources just mentioned. The young men--the shyest creatures in thecountry, and the most sensitive to ridicule--found safety in comic songswhich, if produced badly, raised but the greater laugh. Only once ortwice were these songs imprudently chosen; as a rule, they dealt withsomebody's misfortunes or discomforts, in a humorous, practical-jokingspirit, and so came nearer, probably, to the expression of a genuinevillage sentiment than anything else that was done. But for all thatthey were an imported product. Instead of an indigenous folk-art, withits roots in the traditional village life, I found nothing but worthlessforms of modern art which left the people's taste quite unfed. Once, itis true, a hint came that, democratic though the club might be, it waspossibly not democratic enough. A youth mentioned that at home oneevening he and his family had sat round the table singing songs, out ofsong-books, I think. It suggested that there might still lurk in theneglected cottages a form of artistic enjoyment more crude than anythingthat had come to light, and perhaps more native to the village. But Ihave no belief that it was so. Before I could inquire further, this boydropped out of the movement. When asked why he had not come to oneentertainment, he said that he had been sent off late in the afternoonto take two horses miles away down the country--I forget where--and hadbeen on the road most of the night. A few weeks afterwards, turningeighteen, he went to Aldershot and enlisted. So far as I remember, hewas the only boy of the true labouring class who ever took any activepart in the proceedings--he performed once in a farce. The other lads, although some were sons of labourers and grandsons of peasants, were ofthose who had been apprenticed to trades, and therefore knew a littlemore than mere labourers, though I do not say that they were moreintelligent by nature. 

If, however, they were the pick of the village youth, the fact onlymakes the more impressive certain truths which forced themselves upon mynotice at that time with regard to the needs of the village since theold peasant habits had vanished. There was no mistaking it: intercoursewith these young men showed only too plainly how slow moderncivilization had been to follow modern methods of industry and thrift. Understand, they were well-intentioned and enterprising fellows. Theyhad begun to look beyond the bounds of this parish, and to seek foradaptations to the larger world. Moreover, they were learningtrades--those very trades which have since been introduced into ourelementary schools as a means of quickening the children's intellectualpowers. But these youths somehow had not drawn enlightenment from theirtrades, being, in fact, handicapped all the time by the want of quite adifferent education. To put it rather brutally, they did not understandtheir own language--the standard English language in which modernthinking has to go on in this country. 

For several of the entertainments they came forward to perform farces. After the first diffidence had worn off, they took a keen delight in thepreparations, working hard and cordially; they were singularly ready tobe shown what to do, and to be criticized. "Knock-about" farce--thecounterpart in drama of their comic songs--pleased them best, and theydid well in it. But "Box and Cox" was almost beyond them, because theymissed the meanings of the rather stilted dialogue. In helping to coachthem in their parts I had the best of opportunities to know this. Theyproduced a resemblance to the sound of the sentences, and weresatisfied, though they missed the sense. Instead of saying that he"divested" himself of his clothing, Mr. Box--or was it Cox?--said thathe "invested" himself, and no correction could cure him of saying that. When one of them came to describing the lady's desperate wooing of him, "to escape her importunities" is what he should have said; but what hedid say was "to escape our opportunities"--an error which the audience, fortunately, failed to notice, for it slipped out again at the time ofperformance, after having been repeatedly put right at rehearsal. Andthis sort of thing happened all through the piece. Almost invariably thepoints which depended on a turn of phrase were lost. "I at once give youwarning that I give you warning at once" became, "I at once give youwarning. That is, I give you warning at once. " Cox (or Box) reading thelawyer's letter, never made out the following passage: "I soondiscovered her will, the following extract from which will, I am sure, give you satisfaction. " It was plain that he thought the second word"will" meant the same as the first. 

As evidence of a lack of "book-learning" in the village, this might havebeen insufficient, had it stood alone. But it did not. The misbehaviourof the boys at the night-school has been mentioned. Being a member ofthe school managing committee, I went in to the school occasionally, andwhat I saw left me satisfied that a large part of the master'sdifficulty arose from the unfamiliarity of the scholars with their ownlanguage. That initial ignorance blocked the road to science even morecompletely than, in the Entertainment Club, it did to art. "The Scienceof Horticulture" was the subject of the lesson on one dismal evening, this being the likeliest of some half-dozen "practical sciences"prescribed for village choice by the educational authority at Whitehall. About twenty "students, " ranging from sixteen to nineteen years old, were--no, not puzzling over it: they were "putting in time" asperfunctorily as they dared, making the lesson an excuse for beingpresent together in a warmed and lighted room. When I went in it wasnear the close of the evening; new matter was being entered upon, apparently as an introduction to the next week's lesson. I stood andwatched. The master called upon first one, then another, to read aloud asentence or two out of the textbook with which each was provided; andone after another the boys stood up, shamefaced or dogged, to stumblethrough sentences which seemed to convey absolutely no meaning to them. If it had been only the hard words that floored them--such as"cotyledon" and "dicotyledon"--I should not have been surprised; butthey blundered over the ordinary English, and had next to no sense ofthe meaning of punctuation. I admit that probably they were not tryingto do their best; that they might have put on a little intentionalclumsiness, in the instinctive hope of escaping derision by beingthought waggish. But the pity of it was that they should need to protectthemselves so. They had not the rudimentary accomplishment: that was theplain truth. They could not understand ordinary printed English. 

Of science, of course, they were learning nothing. They may have takenaway from those lessons a few elementary scientific terms, and possiblythey got hold of the idea of the existence of some mysterious knowledgethat was not known in the village; but the advantage ended there. Idoubt if a single member of the class had begun to use his brain in ascientific way, reasoning from cause to effect; I doubt if it dawnedupon one of them that there was such an unheard-of accomplishment to beacquired. They were trying--if they were trying anything at all--to pickup modern science in the folk manner, by rote, as though it were a thingto be handed down by tradition. So at least I infer, not only fromwatching this particular class then and on other occasions, but alsofrom the following circumstance. 

At Christmastime in one of these winters a few of the boys of thenight-school went round the village, mumming. They performed the sameold piece that Mr. Hardy has described in "The Return of theNative"--the same old piece that, as a little child, I witnessed yearsago in a real village; but it had degenerated lamentably. The boys saidthat they had learnt it from an elder brother of one of them, and hadpractised it in a shed; and at my request the leader consented to writeout the piece, and in due time he brought me his copy. I have mislaidthe thing, and write from memory; but I recall enough of it to affirmthat he had never understood, or even cared to fix a meaning to, thewords--or sounds, rather--which he and his companions had gabbledthrough as they prowled around the kitchen clashing their wooden swords. That St. George had become King William was natural enough; but what isto be said of changing the Turkish Knight into the Turkey Snipe? Thatwas one of the "howlers" this youth perpetrated, amongst many othersless striking, perhaps, but not less instructive. The whole thingshowed plainly where the difficulty lay at the night-school. Thebreaking up of the traditional life of the village had failed to supplythe boys either with the language or with the mental habits necessaryfor living successfully under the new conditions. Some of these boyswere probably the sons of parents unable to read and write; none of themcame from families where those accomplishments were habitually practisedor much esteemed. 

The argument, thus illustrated by the state of the boys, extends in itsapplication to practically the whole of the village. "Book-learning" hadbeen very unimportant to the peasant with his traditional lore, but itwould be hard to exaggerate the handicap against which the modernlabourer strives, for want of it. Look once more at his position. In thenew circumstance the man lives in an environment never dreamt of by thepeasant. Economic influences affecting him most closely come, as itwere, vibrating upon him from across the sea. Vast commercial and socialmovements, unfelt in the valley under the old system, are altering allits character; instead of being one of a group of villagers tolerablyindependent of the rest of the world, he is entangled in a network ofeconomic forces as wide as the nation; and yet, to hold his own in thisnew environment, he has no new guidance. Parochial customs and thetraditions of the village make up the chief part of his equipment. 

But for national intercourse parochial customs and traditions arealmost worse than none at all--like a Babel of Tongues. Nationalstandards have to be set up. We cannot, for instance, deal in Winchesterquarts and Cheshire acres, in long hundreds and baker's dozens; we haveno use for weights and measures that vary from county to county, or fora token coinage that is only valid in one town or in one trade. But mostof all, for making our modern arrangements a standard English languageis so necessary that those who are unfamiliar with it can neither managetheir own affairs efficiently nor take their proper share in thenational life. 

And this is the situation of the labourer to-day. The weakness of it, moreover, is in almost daily evidence. One would have thought that atleast in a man's own parish and his own private concerns illiteracywould be no disadvantage; yet, in fact, it hampers him on every side. Whether he would join a benefit society, or obtain poor-law relief, orinsure the lives of his children, or bury his dead, or take up a smallholding, he finds that he must follow a nationalized or standardizedprocedure, set forth in language which his forefathers never heardspoken and never learned to read. Even in the things that are really ofthe village the same conditions prevail. The slate-club is managed uponlines as businesslike as those of the national benefit society. The"Institute" has its secretary, and treasurer, and balance-sheet, andprinted rules; the very cricket club is controlled by resolutionsproposed and seconded at formal committee meetings, and duly entered inminute-books. But all this is a new thing in the village, and noguidance for it is to be found in the lingering peasant traditions. 

To this day, therefore, the majority of my neighbours, whose ability forthe work they have been prepared to do proves them to be no fools, are, nevertheless, pitiably helpless in the management of their own affairs. Most disheartening it is, too, for those whose help they seek, to workwith them. In the cricket-club committee, on which I served for a yearor two, it was noticeable that the members, eager for properarrangements to be made, often sat tongue-tied and glum, incapable ofurging their views, so that only after the meeting had broken up andthey had begun talking with one another did one learn that theresolutions which had been passed were not to their mind. Formalitiespuzzled them--seemed to strike them as futilities. And so in othermatters besides cricket. A local builder--a man of blamelessintegrity--had a curious experience. Somewhat against his wishes, he wasappointed treasurer of the village Lodge of Oddfellows; but when, inheriting a considerable sum of money, he began to buy land and buildhouses, nothing would persuade the illiterate members of the societythat he was not speculating with their funds. Audited accounts had nomeaning for them; possibly the fact that he was doing a service for nopay struck them as suspicious; at any rate they murmured so openly thathe threw up his office. Whom they have got in his place, and whetherthey are suspicious of him too, I do not know. My point is that, whilemodern thrift obliges them to enter into these fellowships, they remain, for mere want of book-learning, unable to help themselves, and dependenton the aid of friends from the middle or employing classes. In otherwords, the greater number of the Englishmen in the village have to standaside and see their own affairs controlled for them by outsiders. 

This is so wholly the case in some matters that nobody ever dreams ofconsulting the people who are chiefly concerned in them. In theeducation of their children, for one thing, they have no voice at all. It is administered in a standardized form by a committee of middle-classpeople appointed in the neighbouring town, who carry out provisionswhich originate from unapproachable permanent officials at Whitehall. The County Council may modify the programme a little; His Majesty'sinspectors--strangers to the people, and ignorant of their needs--issuefiats in the form of advice to the school teachers; and meanwhile theparents of the children acquiesce, not always approving what is done, but accepting it as if it were a law of fate that all such things mustbe arranged over their heads by the classes who have book-learning. 

And this customary attitude of waiting for what the "educated" may dofor them renders them apathetic where they might be, and where it ishighly important that they should be, reliant upon their owninitiative--I mean, in political action. The majority of the labourersin the village have extremely crude ideas of representative government. A candidate for Parliament is not, in their eyes, a servant whom theymay appoint to give voice to their own wishes; he is a "gentleman" who, probably from motives of self-interest, comes to them as a sort of quackdoctor, with occult remedies, which they may have if they will vote forhim, and which might possibly do them good. Hence they hardly look uponthe Government as an instrument at all under the control of people likethemselves; they view it, rather, as a sort of benevolent tyranny, whoseconstitution is no concern of theirs. Commons or Lords, Liberals orTories--what does it matter to the labourer which of them has the power, so long as one or other will cast an occasional look in his direction, and try to do something or other to help him? What they should do restswith the politicians: it is their part to suggest, the labourer's toacquiesce. 

Such are some of the more obvious disabilities from which the cottagepeople suffer, largely for want of book-learning. I think, however, thatthey are beginning to be aware of the disadvantage, for, though they saylittle about it, I have heard of several men getting their children toteach them, in the evening, the lessons learnt at school during the day. Certainly the old contempt for "book-learning" is dying out. And now andthen one hears the most ingenuous confessions of incompetence tounderstand matters of admitted interest. An old woman, discussing"Tariff Reform, " said: "We sort o' people can't understand it forourselves. What we wants is for somebody to come and explain it to us. And then, " she added, "we dunno whether we dares believe what theysays. " If you could hear one even of the better-taught labourers tryingto read out something from a newspaper, you would appreciate hisdifficulties. He goes too slowly to get the sense; the end of aparagraph is too far off from the beginning of it; the thread of theargument is lost sight of. An allusion, a metaphor, a parenthesis, mayeasily make nonsense of the whole thing to a reader who has never heardof the subject alluded to, or of the images called up by the metaphor, and whose mind is unaccustomed to those actions of pausingcircumspection which a parenthesis demands. 

XIX

EMOTIONAL STARVATION

Remembering the tales which get into the papers now and then of riotamongst the "high-spirited young gentlemen" at the Universities, I am alittle unwilling to say more about the unruliness of our village youths, as though it were something peculiar to their rank of life. Yet it mustnot be quite passed over. To be sure, not all the village lads, any morethan all undergraduates, are turbulent and mischievous; yet here, as atOxford, there is a minority who apparently think it manly to beinsubordinate and to give trouble, while here, just as there, the bettersense of the majority is too feeble to make up a public opinion whichthe offenders would be afraid to defy. The disorder of the village ladswas noticeable long ago at the night-school; for example, on an eveningshortly after the "Khaki" election, when Mr. Brodrick (now LordMidleton) had been re-elected for this division. On that evening alecture on Norway, illustrated by lantern slides, could hardly be gotthrough owing to the liveliness of a few lads, who amused all theircomrades by letting off volleys of electioneering cries. I haveforgotten who the lecturer was, but I remember well how the shouts of"Good old Brodrick!" often prevailed, so that one could not hear theman's voice. Since then there have been more striking examples of thesame sort of vivacity. Not two winters ago the weekly meetings of a"boys' club, " which aimed only to help the village lads pass an eveningsensibly, had to be abandoned, owing to the impossible behaviour of themembers. One week I heard that they had run amok amongst the furnitureof the schoolroom where the meetings were held; on the next, they blewout the lamps, and locked one of the organizers into the room for anhour; and a week or two afterwards they piled window-curtains anddoor-mats on to the fire, and nearly got the building ablaze. In short, to judge from what was told me, there seems to have been little todistinguish them from frolicsome undergraduates, save theirpoverty-stricken clothes and their unaspirated speech. It is true theykept their excesses within doors, but then, they had no influentialrelatives to take their part against an interfering police force; andmoreover, most of them came to the meetings a little subdued by tenhours or so of work at wage-earning. Still, their "high spirits" were inevidence, uncontrolled--just as elsewhere--by any high sentiment. Thesense of personal responsibility for their actions, the power tounderstand that there is such a thing as "playing the game" even towardspeople in authority or towards the general public, seemed to be asforeign to them as if they had never had to soil their hands with hardwork. 

Whatever may be the case with others, in the village lads a merelyintellectual unpreparedness is doubtless partly accountable for thisbehaviour. The villagers having had no previous experience of action ingroups, unless under compulsion like that of the railway-ganger or ofthe schoolmaster with his cane, it is strange now to the boys to findthemselves at a school where there is no compulsion, but all is left totheir voluntary effort. And stranger still is the club. A formalsociety, dependent wholly on the loyal co-operation of its members andyet enforcing no obvious discipline upon them, is a novelty in villagelife. The idea of it is an abstraction, and because the old-fashionedhalf-peasant people fifty years ago never needed to think aboutabstractions at all, it turns out now that no family habit of mind forgrasping such ideas has come down from them to their grandsons. 

This mental inefficiency, however, is only a form--a definite form foronce--of a more vague but more prevalent backwardness. The fact is thatthe old ideas of conduct in general are altogether too restricted forthe new requirements, so that the village life suffers throughout from asort of ethical starvation. I gladly admit that, for the day's work andits hardships, the surviving sentiments in favour of industry, patience, good-humour, and so on, still are strong; and I do not forget theadmirable spirit of the cottage women in particular; yet it is true thatfor the wider experiences of modern life other sentiments or ideals, inaddition to those of the peasants, need development, and that progressin them is behindhand in the village. What the misbehaviour of thevillage boys illustrates in one direction may be seen in otherdirections amongst the men and women and children. 

Like other people, the cottagers have their emotional susceptibilities, which, however, are either more robust than other people's or else moresluggish. At any rate it takes more than a little to disturb them. During last winter I heard of a man--certainly he was one of the oldersort, good at many an obsolete rural craft--who had had chilblains burston his fingers, and had sewn up the wounds himself with needle andcotton. There is no suspicion of inhumanity against him, yet it seemedto me that in fiercer times he would have made a willing torturer; andother little incidents--all of them recent ones too--came back to mymind when I heard of him. In one of these a servant-girl from thevillage was concerned--a quiet and timid girl she was said to be; yet, on her own initiative, and without consulting her mistress, she drowneda stray cat which was trying to get a footing in the household. Again, Imyself heard and wondered at the happy prattle of two little girls--thechildren, they, of a most conscientious man and woman--as they told ofthe fun they had enjoyed, along with their father and mother, inwatching a dog worry a hedgehog. And yet it is plain enough that thefaculty for compassion and kindness is inborn in the villagers, so thattheir susceptibilities might just as well be keen as blunt. In theirbehaviour to their pets the gentle hands and the caressing voicesbetoken a great natural aptitude for tenderness. And not to their petsonly. All one afternoon I heard, proceeding from a pig-stye, the voiceof an elderly man who was watching an ailing sow there. "_Come_ on, ol'gal . .. _come_ on, ol' gal, " he said, over and over again in tirelessrepetition, as sympathetically as if he were talking to a child. Wherethe people fail in sensitiveness is from a want of imagination, as wesay, though we should say, rather, a want of suppleness in their ideas. They can sympathize when their own dog or cat is suffering, because usehas wakened up their powers in that direction; but they do not abstractthe idea of suffering life and apply it to the tormented hedgehog, because their ideas have not been practised upon imagined ornon-existent things in such a way as to become, as it were, a detachedpower of understanding, generally applicable. 

But is it to be wondered at if some unlovely features appear in thevillage character? Or is it not rather a circumstance to give onepause, that these commercially unsuccessful and socially neglectedpeople, whose large families the self-satisfied eugenist views with suchsolemn misgivings, should be in the main so kindly, so generous, andsometimes so lofty in their sentiments as in fact they are? With likedisadvantages, where are there any other people in the country who woulddo so bravely? If it is clear that they miss a rich development of theirsusceptibilities, a reason why is no less clear. I have just hinted atit. The ample explanation is in the fact that they have hardly anyimaginary or non-existent subjects upon which to exercise emotionalsensibility for its own sake, so that it may grow strong and fine byfrequent practice; but they have to wait for some real thing to movethem--some distressful occurrence in the valley itself, like thatmentioned earlier in this book, when a man trimming a hedge all butkilled his own child, and a thrill of horror shuddered through thecottages. Of matters like this the people talk with an excitedfascination, there being so little else to stir them. Instead of themoving accident by flood or field, they have the squalid or merelyagonizing accident. Sickness amongst friends or neighbours affordsanother topic upon which their emotion seeks exercise: they linger overthe discussion of it, talking in moaning tones instinctively intended tostimulate feeling. Then there are police-court cases. Some man getsdrunk, and is fined; or cannot pay his rent, and is turned out of hiscottage; or misbehaves in such a way that he is sent to gaol. The talkof it threads its swift way about the village--goes into intimatedetails, too, relating how the culprit's wife "took on" when her man wassentenced; or how his children suffer; or perhaps how the magistratesbullied him, or how he insulted the prosecuting lawyer. 

It is natural that the people should be greedy readers (when they canread at all) of the sensational matter supplied by newspapers. Earthquakes, railway disasters, floods, hurricanes, excite them notreally disagreeably. So, too, does it animate them to hear of prodigiesand freaks of Nature, as when, a little while ago, the papers told of aman whose flesh turned "like marble, " so that he could not bend hislimbs for fear lest they should snap. Anything to wonder at will serve;anything about which they can exclaim. That feeling of the crowd whenfireworks call forth the fervent "_O-oh!_" of admiration, is the villagefeeling which delights in portents of whatever kind. But nothing else isquite so effectual to that end as are crimes of violence, and especiallymurder. For, after all, it is the human element that counts; and thesedescendants of peasants, having no fictitious means of acquaintingthemselves with human passion and sentiment, such as novels and dramassupply in such abundance to other people, turn with all the moreavidity to the unchosen and unprepared food furnished to their starvingfaculties by contemporary crime. 

There is, indeed, another side to their sensationalism which should benoticed. I was a little startled some years ago by a scrap ofconversation between two women. The papers at that time were full of amurder which had been committed in a village neighbouring this, theyoung man accused of it being even then on his trial. It was in theevidence that he had visited his home quite an hour after the time whenthe deed must have been done, and these women were discussing thatpoint, one of them saying: "I don't believe _my_ boy would ha' come 'omethat Sunday night if _he'd_ ha' done it. " It was surprising to me tohear a respectable mother speculate as to how her own son would behavein such a case, or contemplate even the possibility of his being guiltyof murder; and I thought it all too practical a way of considering thesubject. But it revealed how appallingly real such things may be topeople who, as I tried to show farther back, have reason to feel alittle like an alien race under our middle-class law. Very often one maydiscern this personal or practical point of view in theirsensationalism: they indulge it chiefly for the sake of excitement, butwith a side glance at the bearing which the issue may have upon theirown affairs. In a foul case which was dealt with under the Criminal LawAmendment Act, large numbers of our cottage women flocked to the townto hear the trial, attracted partly by the hope of sensation, of course, but also very largely actuated by a sentiment of revenge against theoffender; for here the safety of their own young daughters was involved. 

Be this as it may, still it is true that the two sources I havementioned--namely, the sensational news in the papers and the distressesand misdemeanours in the village itself--supply practically all that theaverage cottager gets to touch his sentiments and emotions into life;and it is plain enough that from neither of these sources, even whensupplemented by a fine traditional family life, can a very desirablespiritual nourishment be obtained. "Real" enough the fare is, in allconscience; but, as usual with realities of that sort, it wantschoiceness. It provides plenty of objects for compassion, for anxiety, for contempt, for ridicule even, but very little for emulation, forreverence. The sentiments of admiration and chivalry, the enthusiasticemotions, are hardly ever aroused in man or woman, boy or girl, in thevillage. Nothing occurs in the natural course to bring what is called"good form" into notice and make it attractive, and at the same time themeans of bringing this about by art demand more money, more leisure andseclusion, more book-learning too, than the average labourer can obtain. In the middle-classes this is not the case. It is true that themiddle-classes have little to boast of in this respect, but generousideas of modesty and reverence, and of "playing the game, " and of publicduty, and of respect for womanhood, have at least a chance of spreadingamongst boys and girls, in households where art and books are valued, and where other things are talked of than the sordid scandals of thevalley and of the police-courts. The difference that the want of thishelp may make was brought forcibly home to me one day. I came upon agroup of village boys at play in the road, just as one of them--a fellowabout thirteen years old--conceived a bright idea for a new game. "NowI'll be a murderer!" he cried, waving his arms ferociously. 

There are other circumstances that tend to keep the standard ofsentiment low. As the boys begin to work for money at so early an age, the money-value of conduct impresses itself strongly upon them, and theysoon learn to think more of what they can get than of what they can door are worth. And while they have lost all the steadying influence thatused to flow from the old peasant crafts, they get none of thesteadiness which would come from continuity of employment. The work theydo as errand-boys calls neither for skill in which they might take pridenor for constancy to any one master; but it encourages them to bemannish and "knowing" long before their time. Of course the moregenerous sentiments are at a discount under such conditions. 

Then, too, there can be little doubt that the "superior" attitude ofthe employing classes has its injurious effect upon the villagecharacter. The youth who sees his father and mother and sisters treatedas inferiors, and finds that he is treated so too, is led unconsciouslyto take a low view of what is due either to himself or to his friends. The sort of view he takes may be seen in his behaviour. The gangs ofboys who troop and lounge about the roads on Sundays are generally beingmerely silly in the endeavour to be witty. They laugh loudly, yet nothumorously and kindly (one very rarely hears really jolly laughter inthe village), but in derision of one another or of the wayfarers--girlsby preference. So far as one can overhear it, their fun is always ofthat contumacious character, and it must be deadly to any sentiment ofmodesty, or honour, or reverence. 

It requires but little penetration to see how these circumstances reactupon the village girls. The frolicsome and giddy appear to enjoythemselves much as the boys do, but the position must be cruel to thoseof a serious tendency. To be treated with disrespect and be made thesubjects of rough wit as they go about is only the more acute part oftheir difficulty. One may suppose that at home they find littleappreciation of any high sentiments, but are driven, in self-defence, tobe rather flippant, rather "worldly. " The greater number of housemistresses, meanwhile, if one may judge from their own complacentconversation, behave in a way most unlikely to contribute to theirservants' self-respect. It is hard to believe that any really highsentiment is to be learnt from women who, for all the world as if theywere village louts, make light of a girl's feelings, and regard herlove-affairs especially as a proper subject for ridicule or forsuspicion. 

XX

THE CHILDREN'S NEED

As one of the managing committee of the village schools for a good manyyears, I have had considerable opportunity of watching the childrencollectively. The circumstances, perhaps, are not altogether favourableto the formation of trustworthy opinions. Seen in large numbers, andunder discipline too, the children look too much alike; one misses theinfinite variety of their personalities such as would appear in them athome. On the other hand, characteristics common to them all, which mightpass unnoticed in individuals, become obvious enough when there are manychildren together. 

In the main the "stock" has always seemed to me good, and to some extentmy impression is supported by the results of the medical inspection nowundertaken at the schools by the County Council. Such defects as thedoctor finds are generally of no deep-seated kind: bad teeth, faultyvision (often due, probably, to improper use of the eyes in school), scalp troubles, running ears, adenoids, and so on, are the commonest. Insufficient nutrition is occasionally reported. In fact the medicalevidence tells, in a varied form, much the same tale that schoolmanagers have been able to read for themselves in the children'sdilapidated boots and clothes, and their grimy hands and uncared-forhair, for it all indicates poverty at home, want of convenience fordecent living, and ignorance as well as carelessness in the parents. Allthis we have known, but now we learn from the doctor that the evileffects of these causes do not stop at the clothes and skin, but go alittle deeper. Yet probably they have not hurt the essential nature ofthe children. Congenital defects are rare; the doctor discovers even ahigh average of constitutional fitness, due, it may be, to severe"natural" selection weeding out the more delicate. It is certain thatthe village produces quite a fair proportion of really handsomechildren, besides those of several of the old families, who are wont tobe of exceptional beauty. Unhappily, before the school-years are over, the fineness usually begins to disappear, being spoilt, I suspect, partly by the privations of the home-life and partly by another cause, of which I will speak by-and-by. 

I think, further--but it is only a vague impression, not worth muchattention--that as regards physique the girls are as a rule morethriving and comely than the boys. The latter appear very apt to becomeknottled and hard, and there is a want of generosity in their growth, asthough they received less care than the girls, and were more used togoing hungry, and being cold and wet. But if my impression is right, there are two points to be noticed in further explanation of it. Thefirst point relates to the early age at which the boys begin to beuseful at work. It has been already told how soon they are set to earn alittle money out of school-hours; but even before that stage is reachedthe little boys have to make themselves handy. On the Saturday holidayit is no uncommon thing to see a boy of eight or nine pushing up thehill a little truck loaded with coal or coke, which he has been sent tobuy at the railway yard. Smaller ones still are sent to the shops, andnot seldom they are really overloaded. Thus at an age when boys inbetter circumstances are hardly allowed out alone, these villagechildren practise perforce a considerable self-reliance, and becomeacquainted with the fatigue of labour. Some little chaps, as they goabout their duties--leading lesser brothers by the hand perhaps, orperhaps dealing very sternly with them, and making them "keep up"without help--have unawares the manner of responsible men. 

That is one point which may help to account for the apparent physicaldisparity between the boys and girls of the village. The other is asubject of remark amongst all who know the school-children. There is nodoubt about it; whether the girls are comelier of growth than the boysor not, they are in behaviour so much more civilized that one mightalmost suppose them to come from different homes. To my mind this mightbe sufficiently explained by the fact that they are usually spared thoseburdensome errands and responsibilities which are thrust so soon upontheir brothers; but the schoolmaster has another explanation, whichprobably contains some truth. His view is that at home the girls comechiefly under the influence of their mothers, whose experience ofdomestic service gives them an idea of manners, while the boys takepattern from their fathers, whose work encourages roughness. Whateverthe cause, the fact remains: the boys may be physically as sound as thegirls, but they certainly have less charm. It is not often delightful tosee them. They do not stand up well; they walk in a slouching andnarrow-chested way; and, though they are mischievous enough, there isstrangely wanting in them an air of alertness, of vivacity, of delightin life. There is no doubt that their heavily-ironed and ill-fittingboots cause them to walk badly; yet it is only reasonable to supposethat this is but one amongst many difficulties, and that, in general, the conditions in which the boys live are unfavourable to a goodphysical growth. 

As regards intellectual power, in boys and girls too, the evidence--tobe quite frank--does not bear out all that I wish to believe; for, inspite of appearances, I am not yet persuaded that these cottage childrenare by birth more dull of wit than town-bred children and those inbetter circumstances. It must be remembered that in this village, sonear as it is to a town, there has been little of that migration totowns which is said to have depleted other villages of their clevererpeople. A few lads go to sea, more than a few into the army; some of thegirls marry outside, and are lost to the parish. But it would be easy togo through the valley and find, in cottage after cottage, the numerousdescendants of old families that flourished here, and were certainly notdeficient in natural brain-power, two generations ago, although it wasnot developed in them on modern lines. Nor need one go back twogenerations. To be acquainted with the fathers and mothers of theschool-children is to know people whose minds are good enough by nature, and are only wanting in acquired power; and when, aware of this, onegoes into the school and sees the children of these parents, some ofthem very graceful, with well-shaped heads and eyes that can sparkle andlips that can break into handsome, laughing curves, it is very hard tobelieve that the breed is dull. The stupidity is more likely due merelyto imperfect nurture; at any rate, one should not accept an explanationof it that disparages the village capacity for intelligence until it ismade clear that the state of the children cannot be explained in anyother way. 

Leaving explanations aside, however, there is the fact, not to begainsaid, that the children in general are slow of wit. One notes it inthe infant school first, and especially in the very youngest classes. There, newly come from their mother's care, the small boys and girlsfrom five to six years old have often a wonderfully vacant expression. There is little of that speculative dancing of the eyes, that evidentappetite for perceptions and ideas, which you will find in well-to-donurseries and playrooms. And whereas in the latter circumstanceschildren will take up pencil or paintbrush confidently, as if born tomaster those tools, the village infant is hesitating, clumsy, feeble. Upon the removal of a child to the upper or "mixed" school, a certainincrease of intelligence often seems to come at a bound. Thecircumstance is highly suggestive. The "infant" of seven is suddenlybrought into contact with older scholars already familiarized withparticular groups of ideas, and those ideas are speedily absorbed by thelittle ones, while the swifter methods of teaching also have theirquickening effect, for a time. But after this jump has been made andlost sight of--that is to say amongst the older scholars, who do notagain meet with such a marked change of environment--one is again awareof considerable mental density throughout the school. The childrenresemble their parents. They are quick enough to observe details, thoughnot always the details with which the teacher is concerned, but theyhave very little power of dealing with the simplest abstractions. Theyare clumsy in putting two thoughts together for comparison; clumsy infollowing reasons, or in discussing underlying principles. In short, "thinking" is an art they hardly begin to practise. They can learn andapply a "rule of thumb, " a folk-rule, so to speak--but there is no flow, nor anything truly consecutive, in the movement of their ideas. Elsewhere one may hear children of six or seven--little well-cared-forpeople--keep up a continual stream of intelligent and happy talk withtheir parents or nursemaids; but to the best of my belief this does nothappen amongst the village children, at any age. 

Observations of them at play, in the cottage gardens or on the road, throw some light on their condition. It would appear that they areextremely ill-supplied with subjects to think about. In the exercise ofimagination, other children fall naturally into habits of consecutivethought, or at any rate of consecutive fancy; but these of the labouringclass have hardly any ideas which their young brains could play with, other than those derived from their own experience of real life in thevalley, or those which they hear spoken of at home. Hence in theirhistrionic games of "pretending" it is but a very limited repertory ofparts that they can take. Two or three times I have come upon a littlegroup of them under a hedgerow or sun-warmed bank, playing at school;the teacher being delightfully severe, and the scholars delightfullynaughty. And now and again there is a feeble attempt at playingsoldiers. Very often, too, one may see boys, in string harness, happy inbeing very mettlesome horses. In one case a subtle variant of this gameinspired two small urchins to what was, perhaps, as good an imaginativeeffort as I have met with in the village. The horse, instead of beingfrisky, was being slow, so that the driver had to swear at him. And mostvindictive and raucous was the infant voice that I heard saying, "Gitup, you blasted lazy cart-'orse!" Other animals are sometimesrepresented. With a realistic grunt, a little boy, beaming all over hisface, said to his companion, "Now I'll be your pig. " Another day itpuzzled me to guess what a youngster was doing, as he capered furiouslyabout the road, wearing his cap pushed back and two short sticksprotruding from beneath it over his forehead; but presently I perceivedthat he was a "bullick" being driven to market. Excepting the casealready mentioned, of the boy who proposed to "be a murderer, " I do notrecall witnessing any other forms of the game of "pretending" amongstthe village children, unless in the play of little girls with theirdolls. There was one very pretty child who used to prattle to mesometimes about her "baby, " and how it had been "bad, " that is to say, naughty, and put to bed; or had not had its breakfast. This little girlwas an orphan who lived with her grandfather and a middle-aged aunt, andwas much petted by them. She was almost alone too, amongst the villagechildren of that period, in being the possessor of a doll, for no morethan five or six years ago one rarely saw such a thing in the village. Christmas-trees have since done something to make up the deficiency. Amonth or two ago I saw a four-year-old girl--a friend of mine from aneighbour's cottage--solemnly walking down a by-lane alone, carrying arag-doll half as big as herself. I stopped, and admired; but, in spiteof her pride, she took a very matter-of-fact view of her toy. "It's headkeeps comin' off, " was all that she could be persuaded to say. 

"Matter-of-fact" is what the children are, for the most part. One autumnevening, after dark, titterings and little squeals of excitement soundedfrom a neighbour's garden, where a man, going to draw water from hiswell, and carrying a lantern, was accompanied by four or five children. In the security of his presence they were pretending to be afraid of"bogies. " "If a bogie was to come, " I heard, "I should get up thatapple-tree, and then if he come up after me I should get down t'otherside. " An excited laugh was followed by the man's contemptuousremonstrance, "_Shut_ up!" which produced silence for a minute or two, until the party were returning to the cottage; when a very endearingvoice called softly, "Bo-gie! Bo-gie! Come, bogie!" This instance offancy in a cottage child stands, however, alone in my experience. I havenever heard anything else like it in the village. The children romp andsquabble and make much noise; they play, though rarely, athide-and-seek; or else they gambol about aimlessly, or try to singtogether, or troop off to look at the fowls or the rabbits. The biggerchildren are as a rule extremely kind to the lesser ones. A family ofsmall brothers and sisters who lived near me some time ago were mostpleasant to listen to for this reason. The smallest of them, athree-year-old boy commonly called "'Arry, " was their pet. "Look, 'Arry;here's a _dear_ little flow-wer! A little 'arts-ease--look, 'Arry!""'Ere, 'Arry, have a bite o' this nice apple!" They were certainlyattractive children, though formidably grubby as to their faces. I heardthem with their father, admiring a litter of young rabbits in the hutch. "O-oh, en't that a _dear_ little thing!" they exclaimed, again andagain. Sunday was especially delightful to them because their father wasat home then; and I liked to hear him playing with them. Oneparticularly happy hour they had, in which he feigned to be angry andthey to be defiant. They jumped about just out of his reach, jeering athim. "Old Father Smither!" they cried, as often as their peals oflaughter would let them cry anything at all. But it struck me as verystrange that their sing-song derision was not going to the right tuneand rhythm; for there is a genuine folk-tune which I thoughtindissolubly wedded to this derisive formula. Beginning in a long drawl, it throws all the weight on the first and fourth syllables: "_Old_Father _Smith_-er. " But these children, apparently ignorant of it, hadinvented a rhythm of their own, in which the first syllable, "Old, " wasalmost elided, and the weight was thrown on the next. I could not helpwondering at the breach which this indicated with the ancient folktraditions. 

If it were necessary, plentiful other evidence could be produced of thechildren's great need for more subjects upon which to exercise theirthoughts and fancies. For one example: some years ago a littlemaidservant from this village was found, when she went to her first"place" in the town, never to have seen a lamb, or a pond of water. Thiswas an extreme case, perhaps; but it suggests how badly the children arehandicapped. As recently as last year, when a circus was visiting thetown, I asked two village boys on the road if they had seen theprocession. They had not; nor had they ever in their lives seen a camelor an elephant; but one of them "thought he should know an elephant, byhis trunk. " He was probably eight years old; and it is worth noting thathe must have owed his enlightenment to books or pictures seen at school;indeed, there is nothing of the sort to be learnt at home, where thereare no books, and where the parents, themselves limited to so narrow arange of experience and therefore of ideas, are not apt to encourageinquisitiveness in their children. A man who lived near me a few yearsago could often be heard, on Sundays and on summer evenings, chidinghis little son for that fault. "Don't you keep on astin' so manyquestions, " was his formula, which I must have heard dozens of times. One can sympathize: it would be so much easier to give the child a bun, or the cottage equivalent, and order him to eat it; but that does notsatisfy the child's appetite for information. Probably the greatdifficulty is that the children's questions can hardly any longer turnupon those old-fashioned subjects which the parents understand, but uponnew-fangled things. And, apart from all this, I suspect that in most ofthe cottages the old notion prevails that children should be kept intheir place, and not encouraged to bother grown-up people with theirtrumpery affairs. 

From the contrast between the talk of the village youngsters and that ofchildren who are better cared for, I inferred just now a want of "flow"in the thoughts of the former, as though the little scrappy ideasexisted in their brains without much relationship to one another. Ofcourse it is possible that the brain activity is far greater than onewould surmise, and that it only seems sluggish because of theinsufficiency of our village speech as a means of expression, forcertainly the people's vocabulary is extremely limited, while they haveno habit of talking in sentences of any complexity. Yet where a languagehas neither abundant names for ideas, nor flexible forms ofconstruction to exhibit variations of thought, it is hard to believethat the brain-life itself is anything but cramped and stiff. 

And if the crude phrasing indicates poverty in the more definite kindsof ideas, I cannot help thinking that another feature of the children'stalk betrays no less a poverty, in respect to those more vague ideaswhich relate to behaviour and to perception of other people's positionand feelings. It was since beginning this chapter that I happened to bewalking for some distance in front of four children--three girls and aboy--from a comfortable middle-class home. It was a Sunday morning, andthey were chatting very quietly, so that their words did not reach me;but I found it very agreeable to hear the variety of cadence in theirvoices, with occasionally pauses, and then a resumption of easy talk, asif they had got a subject to consider in serious lights, and recognizedeach other's right to be heard and understood. Indeed, it bordered onpriggishness, and perhaps over-stepped the border; but nevertheless itmade me feel jealous for our village children, for in the conversationof village children one never hears that suggestion of a consideratemental attitude towards one another. The speech is without flexibilityor modulation of tone; harsh, exclamatory, and screaming, or gutturaland drawling. Rarely, if ever, does one derive from it an impressionthat the children are growing to regard one another's feelings, or oneanother's thoughts. A further point must be mentioned. I hinted thatthere might be an additional cause, besides physical privations, for theloss of the children's attractiveness in many cases even before theyleave school. My belief is that, as they approach the age when ideas ofa sensitive attitude towards life should begin to sway them, unconsciously moulding the still growing features into fineness, thoseideas do not come their way. The boys of eight begin to look, at times, like little men; and the girls of eleven and upwards begin to show signsof acquaintance with struggling domestic economies; but neither boys norgirls discover, in the world into which they are growing up, any trulyhelpful ideas of what it is comely to be and to think. Lingering peasantnotions of personal fitness and of integrity keep them from goingviciously wrong, so that when they come to puberty their perplexedspirits are not quite without guidance; yet, after all, the peasantconditions are gone, and seeing that the new wage-earning conditions donot, of themselves, suggest worthy ideas of personal bearing, thechildren's faculties for that sort of thing soon cease to unfold, andwith a gradual slackening of development the attractiveness disappears. The want is the more to be regretted in that, at a later time of life, when the women have been moulded by motherhood and the men by all thestress and responsibility of their position, such composure and strengthoften appear in them as to justify a suspicion that these uncared-forpeople are by nature amongst the very best of the English. 

V

THE FORWARD MOVEMENT

XXI

THE FORWARD MOVEMENT

The last twenty years having witnessed so much change in the village, itis interesting to speculate as to the farther changes that may be lookedfor in the years to come; indeed, it is more than merely interesting. Educational enthusiasts are busy; legislators have their eye onvillages; throughout the leisured classes it is habitual to look upon"the poor" as a sort of raw material, to be remodelled according toleisured ideas of what is virtuous, or refined, or useful, or nice; andnobody seems to reflect that the poor may be steadily, albeitunconsciously, moving along a course of their own, in which they mightbe helped a little, or hindered a little, by outsiders, but from whichthey will not in the long run be turned aside. Yet such a movement, ifit is really proceeding, will obviously stultify the mostwell-intentioned schemes that are not in accordance with it. 

And, if I am not greatly mistaken, it is under way. That seems to me anill-grounded complacency which permits easy-going people to say lightly, "Of course we want a few reforms, " as if, once those reforms werebrought to pass, the labouring population would thereafter settle downand change no more. In one respect, no doubt, there is little more to belooked for. The changes so far observed have been thrust upon the peoplefrom outside--changes in their material or social environment, followedby mere negations on their part, in the abandonment of traditionaloutlooks and ambitions; and of course in that negative direction themovement must come to an end at last. But when there are no more oldhabits to be given up, there is still plenty of scope for acquiring newones, and this is the possibility that has to be considered. What if, quietly and out of sight--so quietly and inconspicuously as to beunnoticed even by the people themselves--their English nature, dissatisfied with negations, should have instinctively set to work in apositive direction to discover a new outlook and new ambitions? What ifthe merely mechanical change should have become transmuted into a vitalgrowth in the people's spirit--a growth which, having life in it, mustneeds go on spontaneously by a process of self-unfolding? If that shouldbe the case, as I am persuaded that it is, then the era of change in thevillage is by no means over; on the contrary, it is more likely that thegreatest changes are yet to come. 

As the signs which should herald their approach will be those ofrecovery from the mental and spiritual stagnation into which the villagehas been plunged, and as we may regard that stagnation as thestarting-point from which any further advance will proceed, it is worthwhile to fix it in our minds by a similitude. What has most obviouslyhappened to the village population resembles an eviction, when theinmates of a cottage have been turned out upon the road-side with theirgoods and chattels, and there they sit, watching the dismantling oftheir home, and aware only of being moved against their will. It is agenuine movement of them; yet it does not originate with them; and thefirst effect of it upon them is stagnation. Unable to go on in their oldway, yet knowing no other way in which to go on, they merely waitdisconsolate. 

The similitude really fits the case very well, in this village at least, and probably in many others. Of the means whereby the people have beenthrust out from the peasant traditions in which they were at home I havediscussed only the chief one--namely, the enclosure of the common. Thatwas the cause which irresistibly compelled the villagers to quit theirold life; but of course there were other causes, less conspicuous herethan they have been elsewhere, yet operative here too. Free Trade, whilst it made the new thrift possible, at the same time effectuallyundermined many of the old modes of earning a living; and moredestructive still has been the gradual adoption of machinery for ruralwork. We are shocked to think of the unenlightened peasants who brokeup machines in the riots of the eighteen-twenties, but we are only nowbeginning to see fully what cruel havoc the victorious machines playedwith the defeated peasants. Living men were "scrapped"; and not onlyliving men. What was really demolished in that struggle was the countryskill, the country lore, the country outlook; so that now, though wehave no smashed machinery, we have a people in whom the pride of life isbroken down: a shattered section of the community; a living engine whosefly-wheel of tradition is in fragments, and will not revolve again. Letus mark the finality of that destruction before going further. Whateverprosperity may return to our country places, it will not be on the oldterms. The "few reforms, " whether in the direction of import duties, orsmall holdings, or "technical education" in ploughing or fruit-pruningor forestry or sheep-shearing, can never in themselves be a substitutefor the lost peasant traditions, because they are not the same kind ofthing. For those traditions were no institutions set up and cherished byoutside authority. Associated though they were with industrial andmaterial well-being, they meant much more than that to country folk;they lived in the popular tastes and habits, and they passed onspontaneously from generation to generation, as a sort of ruralcivilization. And you cannot create that sort of thing by Act ofParliament, or by juggling with tariffs, or by school lessons. Animitation of the shell of it might be set up; but the life of it isgone, not to be restored. That is the truth of the matter. The old ruraloutlook of England is dead; and the rural English, waiting for somethingto take its place, for some new tradition to grow up amongst them, arein a state of stagnation. 

In looking for signs of new growth, it must be observed that not allsteps in the transition are equally significant. Amongst themodifications of habit slowly proceeding in the village to-day, thereare some which should be regarded rather as a final relinquishment ofold ways than as a spontaneous forward movement into new ones. Thus, although the people comply more and more willingly with the by-laws ofthe sanitary authority, I could not say with conviction that this isanything more than a compliance. As they grow less used to squalor, nodoubt they cannot bear its offensiveness so well as of old; but we maynot infer from this fact that any new and positive aspirations towards acomelier home-life have been born in them. The improvement is only oneof those negative changes that have been thrust upon them from theoutside. 

Nor can anything better be said of their increasing conformity to therequirements of the new thrift. I think it true that the wages are spentmore prudently than of old. The sight of a drunken man begins to beunusual; he who does not belong to a "club" is looked upon as animprovident fool; but to imagine the people thus parsimonious for thepleasure of it is to imagine a vain thing. Their occasional outbursts ofextravagance and generosity go to show that their innermost taste hasnot found a suitable outlet in wage-earning economy. That miserly"thrift" which is preached to them as the whole duty of "the Poor"--whatattractions can it have for their human nature? If men practise it, theydo so under the compulsion of anxiety, of fear. Their acquiescence mayseem like a change; yet as it springs from no germinating tastes ordesires or inner initiative, so it acquires no true momentum. Not inthat, nor in any other submissive adaptation to the needs of the passingmoment, shall we see where the villagers are really rousing out ofstagnation into a new mode of life. 

On the other hand, where their vitality goes out, under no necessity, but of its own accord, to do something new just for the sake of doingit, there a true growth is proceeding; and there are signs that this ishappening. Especially one notes three main directions in which, as Ithink, the village is astir--three directions, coinciding with threekinds of opportunity. The opportunities are those afforded, first by theChurch and other agencies of a missionary kind; second, by newspapers;and third, by political agitation. In each of these directions thevillage instincts appear to be finding something that they want, and tobe moving towards it spontaneously--for they are under no compulsion tomove. The invitations from the Church, it is true, never cease; but novillager is obliged to accept them against his will, any more than ahorse need drink water put before him. 

1. In estimating the influence of the Church (Dissent has but a smallfollowing here) it should be remembered that until some time after theenclosure of the common the village held no place of worship of anydenomination. Moreover, the comparatively few inhabitants of that timewere free from interference by rich people or by resident employers. They had the valley to themselves; they had always lived as they liked, and been as rough as they liked; and there must have been memoriesamongst them--quite recent memories then--of the lawless life of otherheath-dwellers, their near neighbours, in the wide waste hollows ofHindhead. We may therefore surmise that when the church was built asprinkling at least of the villagers were none too well pleased. Thismay partly explain the sullen hostility of which the clergy are stillthe objects in certain quarters of the village, and which the Pharisaismof some of their friends does much to keep alive. The same causes mayhave something to do with the fact that the majority of the labouringmen appear to take no interest at all in religion. 

Still, there are more than a few young men, and of the old village stocktoo, who yield very readily to the influences of the Church. A familytradition no doubt predisposes them to do so; for, be it said, not allof the old villagers were irreligious. Echoes of a rustic Christianity, gentle and resigned as that which the Vicar of Wakefield taught to hisflock, may be heard to-day in the talk of aged men and women here andthere; and though that piety has gone rather out of fashion, the tastefor something like it survives in these young men. The Church attractsthem; they approve its ideas of decorous life; it is a school of goodmanners to them, if not of high thinking, with the result that theybegin to be quite a different sort of people from their fathers andgrandfathers. A pleasant suavity and gentleness marks their behaviour. They are greatly self-respecting. Their tendency is to adopt and live upto the middle-class code of respectability. 

Neither by temperament nor by outlook are they equipped for the hardshipof real labouring life. These are the men, rather, who get the lighterwork required by the residential people in the villa gardens; or theyfill odd places in the town, where character is wanted more thanstrength or skill. They fill them well, too, in very trustworthy andindustrious fashion. A few of them have learnt trades, and are savingmoney, as bricklayers, carpenters, clerks even. It was from the ranks ofthis group that a young man emerged, some years ago, as a speculatingbuilder. He put up three or four cottages, and then came to grief; but Inever heard that anybody but himself suffered loss by the collapse ofhis venture. He has left the neighbourhood, and I mention him now onlyto exhibit the middle-class tendencies of his kind. You will not findany of these men going to a public-house. The "Institute" caters forthem, with its decorous amusements--billiards, dominoes, cribbage; butthey do not much affect the Institute Reading Room; indeed, I believethem to be intellectually very docile to authority. Opinions they have, on questions of the day, but not opinions formed by much effort of theirown. The need of the village, as they have felt it, is less for mentalthan for ethical help. They desire something to guide their conduct andtheir pastimes, and this leads them to respond to the invitation of theChurch and its allied influences. 

I have an impression, too, that indirectly, through their example, others are affected by those influences who do not so consciously yieldto them; at any rate a softening of manners seems to be in progress inthe village. It is not much, perhaps; it is certainly very indefinite, and no doubt there are other causes helping to further it; but, such asit is, the chief credit for it is due to the lead given by the Church. Indeed, no other agency has done anything at all in the way of proposingto the people an art of living, a civilization, to replace that of theold rustic days. 

2. With few exceptions the newspapers--chiefly weeklies, but here andthere a daily--which come into the villagers' hands are of the "yellowpress" kind; but for once a good effect may be attributed to them. Itresembles that which, in a smaller way, springs from the opportunitiesof travelling afforded by railways. Just as few of our people now arewholly restricted in their ideas of the world to this valley and thehorizons visible from its sides, but the most of them, in excursionholidays at least, have seen a little of the extent and variety ofEngland, so, thanks to the cheap press, ideas and information about thewhole world are finding their way into the cottages of the valley; andat the present stage it is not greatly important that the information isless trustworthy than it might be. The main thing is that the villagemind should stretch itself, and look beyond the village; and this iscertainly happening. The mere material of thought, the quantity ofsubjects in which curiosity may take an interest, is immeasurablygreater than it was even twenty years ago; and, if but sleepily as yet, still the curiosity of the villagers begins to wake up. However superioryou may think yourself, you must not now approach any of the youngerlabouring men in the assumption that they have not heard of the subjectyou speak of. The coal-heaver, whose poverty of ideas I describedfarther back, was talking to me (after that chapter was written) aboutthe life of coal-miners. He told of the poor wages they get for theirdangerous work; he discoursed of mining royalties, and explained somepoints as to freightage and railway charges; and he was drifting towardsthe subject of Trades Unions when our short walk home together came toan end. Of course in this case the man's calling had given a directionto his curiosity; but there are many subjects upon which the wholevillage may be supposed to be getting ideas. Shackleton and the SouthPole are probably household words in most of the cottages; it may betaken for granted that the wonders of flying machines are being eagerlywatched; it must not be taken for granted at all that the villagers areignorant about disease germs, and the causes of consumption, and thespreading of plague by rats. Long after the King's visit to India, ideasof Indian scenes will linger in the valley; and presently, when thePanama Canal nears completion, and pictures of it begin to be given inthe papers, there will hardly be a labourer but is more or less familiarwith the main features of the work, and is more or less aware of itsimmense political and commercial importance. 

Thus the field of vision opens out vastly, ideas coming into it inenough variety and abundance to begin throwing side-lights upon oneanother and to illumine the whole village outlook upon life. And whilethe field widens, the people are winning their way to a greater power ofsurveying it intelligently; for one must notice how the newspapers, besides giving information, encourage an acceptance of non-parochialviews. The reader of them is taken into the public confidence. Insteadof a narrow village tradition, national opinions are at his disposal, and he is helped to see, as it were from the outside, the general aspectof questions which, but for the papers, he would only know by hisindividual experience from the inside. To give one illustration: thelabourer out of work understands now more than his own particularmisfortunes from that cause. He is discovering that unemployment is aworld-wide evil, which spreads like an infectious disease, and may betreated accordingly. It is no small change to note, for in such ways, all unawares, the people fall into the momentous habit of thinking aboutabstract ideas which would have been beyond the range of theirforefathers' intellectual power; and with the ideas, their sentimentsgain in dignity, because the newspapers, with whatever ulterior purpose, still make their appeal to high motives of justice, or public spirit, orpublic duty. Fed on this fare, a national or standardized sentiment isgrowing amongst the villagers, in place of the local prejudices which, in earlier times, varied from valley to valley and allowed the people ofone village occasionally to look upon those in the next as their naturalenemies. 

3. Once or twice before I have mentioned, as characteristic of thepeasant outlook, the fatalism which allowed the poor to accept theirposition as part of the unalterable scheme of the universe, and Iassociated the attitude with their general failure to think in terms ofcause and effect. It would seem that this settled state of mind isslowly giving way under the political excitement of the last ten years. I cannot say, as yet, that anything worthy to be called hope has dawnedupon the cottagers; but an inclination to look into things forthemselves is discernible. 

The change, such as it is, was begun--or, let us say, the ground wasprepared for its beginning--by the distress of unemployment whichfollowed the South African War; for then was bred that great discontentwhich came to the surface at last in the General Election of 1906. Iwell remember how, on the day when the Liberal victory in this divisionwas made known, the labouring men, standing about with nothing to do, gladdened at the prospects of the relief which they supposed must atonce follow, and how their hungry eyes sparkled with excitement. "Timethere _was_ a change, " one of them said to me, "with so many o' we poorchaps out o' work. " Then, as the months went by, and things worsenedrather than bettered, reaction set in. "'Twas bad enough under theConservatives, but 'tis ten times worse under the Liberals. " That wasthe opinion I heard expressed, often enough to suggest that it waspassing into a by-word. So, to all appearance, the old apathy wasfalling upon the people, as no doubt it had often done before after amomentary gleam of hope, confirming them in the belief that, whateverhappened, it would not, as they said, "make much odds to the likes o'we. "

This time, however, a new factor in the situation had been introduced, which tended to keep alive in village minds the possibility thatPoverty, instead of being the act of God, was an effect of causes whichmight be removed. The gospel of "Tariff Reform" promised so much as tomake it worth the people's while to pay a little attention to politics. Men who had never before in their lives tried to follow a logicalargument began at last to store up in their memory reasons and figuresin support of the fascinating doctrine, and if they were puzzle-headedover it, they were not more so than their leaders. Besides, in theircase merely to have begun is much. Look at the situation. During six orseven years, there has been before the village a vision of better timesto be realized by political action, and by support of a programme or apolicy, and the interest which the people have taken in it marks adefinite step forwards from the lethargy of stagnation in which they hadpreviously been sunk. True, this particular vision seems fading now. Just when it ought to have been growing clearer and nearer, if it was tojustify itself, it becomes dim and remote, and my neighbours, I fancy, are reverting to their customary attitude of aloofness from partypolitics; but I should be much surprised to find that it is quite inthe old spirit. For the old spirit was one of indifference; it rested inthe persuasion that politicians of either side were only seeking theirown ends, and that the game was a rich man's game, in which the poorwere not meant to share. That, however, is hardly the persuasion now. Ifthe labourers hold aloof, keeping their own counsel, it is no longer asoutsiders, but as interested watchers, ready to take part stronglywhenever a programme shall be put before them that deserves their help. 

I have suggested that the tendency of those who are influenced by theChurch is towards a middle-class outlook, and that their interestcentres in developments of taste and conduct rather than of intellectand opinion. Nothing so definite can be said as to the effects ofnewspaper reading and political excitement; nevertheless, I am consciousof effects everywhere present. The labourers whose interests turn inthis direction seem to be treading in the footsteps of the skilledartisans in the town, towards ambitions not in all respects identicalwith those of the middle-classes. Of course the unskilled labourerearning eighteen shillings a week has not equal opportunities with theman who earns thirty-six; he cannot buy the newspapers and occasionalbooks to which the other treats himself and his children, and in generalhe is less well informed. But the same grave and circumspect talk goesdown with the one as with the other; to both the same topics areinteresting. 

And for me the probability of a development for our village labourerssimilar to that of the town artisans is heightened, by recollection ofwhat artisans themselves were like, say a quarter of a century ago. Iknew a few of these very well. As craftsmen they were as able as thoseof to-day; but their crafts had not taught them to think. While theyworked by rule of thumb, outside their work they were as full ofprejudices, and as unable to grasp reasons, as any of my villageneighbours. The most of them, in fact, had been born in villages nearthe town, and retained a good deal of the rural outlook. Their gardens, and the harvest--yes, and odd scraps of very ancient folk-lore whichthey still believed--occupied an important place in their attention. They had quite the old attitude towards their employers; quite the oldstubborn distrust of innovations in their work. When, however, you turnto their successors, you find a difference. I will not say that they areless able than their predecessors, or less trustworthy; but they havebroken away from all that old simplicity of mind; they are thinking forthemselves, and informing themselves, with an unresting and unhastinginterest, about what the rest of the world knows. It fills me withshame, when I consider my own so much better opportunities, to find howmuch these hard-working men have learnt, and with what cool tenacitythey think. Where they are most wanting is in enthusiasm and the hopesthat breed it; or say, in belief that the world may yet change for thebetter--though here, too, political excitement is doing its fatefulwork. I find them very jealous for their children to do well: freeeducation has not sapped their sense of parental responsibility, but hasinspired them with ambitions, though not for themselves. For themselvesthey are conscious of a want of that book-learned culture which thepractice of their skilled crafts cannot bestow, and this makes themsuspicious of those who have it and diffident in conversation with them. But underneath this reticence and willingness to hear dwells a quietscepticism which has no docility in it, and is not to be persuaded outof its way by any eloquence or any emotion. Missionary influences, likethose of church and chapel, make but little impression on thesequiet-eyed men. The tendency is towards a scientific rather than anęsthetic outlook. 

And just as, amongst the skilled craftsmen, there are individualsrepresenting every stage of the advance from five-and-twenty years agountil now, so the earlier stages at least of the same advance arerepresented, one beyond another, by labouring men in this village. Icould not find any labourers who are so far forward as the forwardestartisans; but I could find some who have travelled, say, half the way, and many who have reached different points between that and thestagnation which was the starting-point for all. Hence I cannot doubtthat the villagers in general are moving on the route along which thetown artisans have passed a generation ahead of them. They are hinderedby great poverty; hampered by the excessive fatigues of their dailywork; entrammelled by remnants of the peasant traditions which stillcling about them; but the movement has begun. The first stupefyingeffect of their eviction from the peasant life is passing away, and theyare setting their faces towards the future, to find a new way of life. 

It may be urged that, along with the Church, the newspaper and politics, education should have been named, as a fourth power affecting thevillage destinies. A moment's consideration, however, will discover thatit does not come into the same category with those three influences, ifonly for this reason, that it is forced upon the village children fromoutside, while the older people have no chance to interest themselves init as they have in the Church teachings or in the daily paper. Nospontaneous movement, therefore, such as I have outlined in the othercases, can be traced in regard to education; but I had a stronger reasonthan that for omitting mention of it. To be quite plain, I do not thinkit is making anything like so much impression on the village life as itought to make, and as it is commonly supposed to be making. It is notquite a failure; but it is by no means a great success. In so far as ithas enabled the people to read their papers (and it has not done thatvery well) it has been serviceable; but neither as a cause of change noras a guide into happier ways of life has it any claim to especialmention in these chapters. I am not saying that it is unworthy ofattention: on the contrary, there is no subject relating to the villagethat demands so much. If, as I believe, it is one, and the foremost, ofthose activities which are largely abortive because they have not gotinto touch with the spontaneous movement of the village life, the matteris of the utmost seriousness. But this is not the place for enteringinto it; for I have not set out to criticize the varied experiments inreform which are being tried upon the labouring people. My book isfinished, now that I have pointed to the inner changes going on in thevillage itself. 

As to the future of those changes, I will not add to what I have alreadysaid, but there is evidently much room for speculation; and those whobest know the villagers--their brave patience, their sincerity, theexcellent groundwork of their nature--and those who see how full ofpromise are the children, generation after generation, until hardshipand neglect spoil them, will be slow to believe what leisured folk areso fond of saying--namely, that these lowly people owe their lowlinessto defects in their inborn character. It is too unlikely. The racewhich, years ago, in sequestered villages, unaided by the outer worldat all, and solely by force of its own accumulated traditions, couldbuild up that sturdy peasant civilization which has now gone--that race, I say, is not a race naturally deficient. There is no saying what itsoffspring may not achieve, once they get their powers of intellect awakeon modern lines and can draw freely upon the great world for ideas. 

At any rate, the hope is great enough to forbid the indulgence of anydeep regret for what has gone by. The old system had gone on longenough. For generations the villagers had grown up and lived and diedwith large tracts of their English vitality neglected, unexplored; and Ido not think the end of that wasteful system can be lamented by anyonewho believes in the English. Rather it should reconcile us to thedisillusionments of this present time of transition. They aredevastating, I admit; for me, they have spoilt a great deal of thatpleasure which the English country used to give me, when I still fanciedit to be the scene of a joyful and comely art of living. I know now thatthe landscape is not peopled by a comfortable folk, whose dear andintimate love of it gave a human interest to every feature of itsbeauty; I know that those who live there have in fact lost touch withits venerable meanings, while all their existence has turned sordid andanxious and worried; and knowing this, I feel a forlornness in countryplaces, as if all their best significance were gone. But, notwithstanding this, I would not go back. I would not lift a finger, or say a word, to restore the past time, for fear lest in doing so Imight be retarding a movement which, when I can put these sentimentsaside, looks like the prelude to a renaissance of the Englishcountry-folk. 

 Note. --In the preceding chapters no reference is made either to the new Insurance Act or to recent labour unrest. The book was, in fact, already in the publishers' hands when those matters began to excite general attention; and it hardly seems necessary now, merely for the sake of being momentarily up to date, to begin introducing allusions which after all would leave the main argument unchanged. 

 _December_, 1911. 

THE END

BILLING AND SONS, LTD. , PRINTERS, GUILDFORD