representing every stage of the advance from five-and-twenty years ago
until now, so the earlier stages at least of the same advance are
represented, one beyond another, by labouring men in this village. I
could not find any labourers who are so far forward as the forwardest
artisans; but I could find some who have travelled, say, half the way,
and many who have reached different points between that and the
stagnation which was the starting-point for all. Hence I cannot doubt
that the villagers in general are moving on the route along which the
town artisans have passed a generation ahead of them. They are hindered
by great poverty; hampered by the excessive fatigues of their daily
work; entrammelled by remnants of the peasant traditions which still
cling about them; but the movement has begun. The first stupefying
effect of their eviction from the peasant life is passing away, and they
are 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 the
village destinies. A moment's consideration, however, will discover that
it does not come into the same category with those three influences, if
only for this reason, that it is forced upon the village children from
outside, while the older people have no chance to interest themselves in
it as they have in the Church teachings or in the daily paper. No
spontaneous movement, therefore, such as I have outlined in the other
cases, can be traced in regard to education; but I had a stronger reason
than that for omitting mention of it. To be quite plain, I do not think
it is making anything like so much impression on the village life as it
ought to make, and as it is commonly supposed to be making. It is not
quite a failure; but it is by no means a great success. In so far as it
has enabled the people to read their papers (and it has not done that
very well) it has been serviceable; but neither as a cause of change nor
as a guide into happier ways of life has it any claim to especial
mention in these chapters. I am not saying that it is unworthy of
attention: on the contrary, there is no subject relating to the village
that demands so much. If, as I believe, it is one, and the foremost, of
those activities which are largely abortive because they have not got
into touch with the spontaneous movement of the village life, the matter
is of the utmost seriousness. But this is not the place for entering
into it; for I have not set out to criticize the varied experiments in
reform which are being tried upon the labouring people. My book is
finished, now that I have pointed to the inner changes going on in the
village itself.
As to the future of those changes, I will not add to what I have already
said, but there is evidently much room for speculation; and those who
best know the villagers--their brave patience, their sincerity, the
excellent groundwork of their nature--and those who see how full of
promise are the children, generation after generation, until hardship
and neglect spoil them, will be slow to believe what leisured folk are
so fond of saying--namely, that these lowly people owe their lowliness
to defects in their inborn character. It is too unlikely. The race
which, years ago, in sequestered villages, unaided by the outer world
at all, and solely by force of its own accumulated traditions, could
build up that sturdy peasant civilization which has now gone--that race,
I say, is not a race naturally deficient. There is no saying what its
offspring may not achieve, once they get their powers of intellect awake
on 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 any
deep regret for what has gone by. The old system had gone on long
enough. For generations the villagers had grown up and lived and died
with large tracts of their English vitality neglected, unexplored; and I
do not think the end of that wasteful system can be lamented by anyone
who believes in the English. Rather it should reconcile us to the
disillusionments of this present time of transition. They are
devastating, I admit; for me, they have spoilt a great deal of that
pleasure which the English country used to give me, when I still fancied
it to be the scene of a joyful and comely art of living. I know now that
the landscape is not peopled by a comfortable folk, whose dear and
intimate love of it gave a human interest to every feature of its
beauty; I know that those who live there have in fact lost touch with
its venerable meanings, while all their existence has turned sordid and
anxious and worried; and knowing this, I feel a forlornness in country
places, 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 I
might be retarding a movement which, when I can put these sentiments
aside, looks like the prelude to a renaissance of the English
country-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