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be hollow, wanting filling stones.' This was the social function of the yeomanry, they were the filling stones in the tower of state, the 'bottom' in the richer grass above them. They lived sometimes in substantial houses, little smaller than that of the squire. In social intercourse, however, the whole community of a county was by their means welded together, so that squire and labourer were connected by a continuous gradation in which the various ranks were evenly smoothed one into the other. They intermingled perpetually, in church, at wakes, at market, at the shearings, and in jollifications up at the hall. Country life had then a solidarity and homogeneity entirely lacking since they went. The causes of their disappearance are too well known to need repetition. Chief amongst them are the enclosure of common lands, and the breaking up of common herds. The reason for the former was social-the continual demand for land by rich men, principally of the non-landed class, for parks, estates, etc.; but even more the causes of the change were economic and agricultural. Improvements such as those instituted by Tull, Townshend, Young, and Coke of Norfolk, which brought large profits to men with the capital to adopt them, meant ruin for the poor and incompetent. The final collapse was due to the Industrial Revolution which killed home industries and presented new opportunities for men with the money which the sale of their farms would fetch.

By 1850, or by the bad year 1879-80 at latest, the elimination of the old small owners, so far as they could be regarded as a class, was complete; their holdings had been lumped into a large farm, the common waste had been enclosed and was being highly cultivated; their houses had become cottages-now restored and gutted into a 'manor house-and England ceased to show any but isolated examples of a possessive peasantry. So far as agriculture goes, this was probably inevitable, and, though authorities differ, the balance on the whole was beneficial. It is when the question is regarded sociologically that it appears most certainly as a misfortune-the destruction of that old unity of interests which made every country estate a world in itself and independent of the town.

Under modern conditions, even where the squire

remains, village-consciousness is disappearing; paternal government on the part of the squire is resented. The industrial revolution rendered the village no longer a self-contained unit; and industrialism is steadily depleting the village population, though sometimes substituting mere residents, who are in fact workers in the towns. The coming of the railways, still more of the omnibus, has broken down the barrier between town and country. Railways, tramways, and omnibuses, after the Reform Bill, have been the most potent agency in the degradation of country life. A quicker pace has been set for life, which can hardly wait for the slower march of the seasons. The population is more restless and fluid. Moreover, rapidity of travel seriously interferes with the formation of a new race of landowners and of a contented peasantry.

Of late years a halt has been called in some directions of the decline; especially in that of agriculture. But it is the State and other organisations that are taking the lead in the movement. Endowed agricultural colleges are forging ahead in experimental work at Cambridge, Rothamsted, Oxford, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Reading, and great numbers of farm managers, and the sons of squires themselves, are being turned out as up-to-date agriculturists. The process of bringing the various soils of England into economically sound employment will take a long time; and at present it involves the further depopulation of the countryside. Thousands of acres every year are being laid back to grass, mills are abandoned, and the country forced to rely on towns even for its bread; whilst mechanical contrivances diminish the demand for labour. Wages, too, are such that at present they cannot possibly be paid to as many men as are still on the land. Nationalisation and peasant proprietorship are advocated, but as England has passed through, and out of, the latter system, and experiments in nationalisation so far in this country have proved discouraging, the most hopeful development would be a rissorgimento of the squires, armed with expert knowledge and the trust of their tenants. Much has already been achieved by education, and the activities of societies and associations. The large numbers of gentlemenfarmers, also, may in time become a kind of new

yeomanry without the ignorance that characterised that class in former days. Any legislation that makes the landowner work at his estate is beneficial.

Yet still the prospect is forbidding. Such reactions as these suggested are not common to history, and precedents and probability alike point to a continuous decline in England of village consciousness and country life. Dark as may seem the prospects represented by the decay of the old historic houses and country families, we-in these pages at any rate-still hope that something may be done, by parliamentary or personal effort, to stop the decay. The owners of those estates, who, as a class, are invaluable to national life, are the hardest used of the community. They are taxed almost to extinction, ridden with rates to the last extremity, and one of the earliest duties of a constructive Government which really has the welfare of the people at heart should be to lighten that load. For, apart from their economic utility and necessity to an island which, as we saw five years ago, in time of war, is unable sufficiently to feed and maintain itself, our country houses, and those of the old families who still live in them, represent symbolically and actually the continuity of life. Nature permits all kinds of liberties and hustlings, but beneath them all runs the long mute river of continuity-a force of tremendous, if unseen, power for good. Once broken, a virtue has gone out of a whole nation. Continuity of traditions has made England the most free and leisured nation of the world. That nation must think several times before it breaks with the past of its countryside.

CHRISTOPHER HUSSEY.

Art. 7.-THE PERSONALITY OF LORD MORLEY.

II.

LORD MORLEY's style is an austere style; it has more grace than charm, it diffuses light but it does not generate heat. In this respect it is a true reflexion of the writer's mind; he is a moralist whose passion for truth makes him dispassionate to almost everything else, and it is characteristic of him that he emphasises somewhere what he calls the 'morality of style.' He avoids rhetoric for its toxic effect, as an athlete avoids strong drink. He has reproached Rousseau and Carlyle with their emotion as being a dispersal of energy that might have taken a more intellectual form. His style is almost the exact converse of Rousseau's; as he thinks, so he writes, in concepts not in images, which, it may be remarked, places him far above Rousseau as a thinker, though it depresses him below Rousseau as an imaginative writer. He has neither the colour of Burke nor the poetry of Carlyle nor the wistfulness of Newman; he is rarely intimate like Browne and never colloquial like Dryden, which is to say that he is the most impersonal of all our great writers of prose. It is the style of a man who has himself under perfect control, and to find an analogy one must turn to the great French writers, to Voltaire and to Renan-in other words, to writers who, except in rare moments, use language not to express an individual emotion but as the instrument of a critical method. He is a master of the aphorism, the most impersonal of all forms of utterance and the most French. On the other hand, there are not a few passages in his writings which suggest that this self-restraint, what Pater would call the beauty of a frugal closeness of style,' has only been attained by a deliberate literary asceticism, and that if he liked-but he rarely likes to yield to the enchantments of sense he might sound what stop he pleases. But this and more than this I have said elsewhere.

Of his methods of work as a master of his craft I was privileged to see a good deal. It was in the composition of his last literary work-the 'History and Politics,' which was written in 1912 and published in 1914. I say his last work, because the 'Recollections,' although

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published later, were not the efflorescence of his old age, most of the pages therein having been written many years earlier-indeed, the first volume with its admirable literary portraits, was the work not of his decline but of his meridian. In his later years he wrote, as he spoke, with great difficulty-in fact, every kind of composition, whether literary or oratorical, had become an almost painful effort. The History and Politics,' which originated as a rectorial address at Manchester, cost him many anxious vigils, both before its delivery and after it when he was casting it into its final literary shape. He did me the honour to ask for my help at the outset-I would not mention it now but for the fact that it gave rise to an interesting scheme for another book which was never written and which now keeps company in eternal silence with those other spectral volumes on Lucretius, Goethe, and Calvin, which will never see the light of common day. My own part in the 'History and Politics' was assuredly nothing to boast of; the best that can be said of it is that I played the part of Socratic midwife. Of the whole book only one page-that on the relation between law and politics-is from my pen, but Lord Morley was so over-generous in the many letters he wrote to me on the subject that I prayed him to say nothing more about it and to omit all reference to myself in its pages. The manuscript and the proof-sheets passed to and fro between us, accompanied by the exchange of many books and many illuminating little notes containing some of those searching interrogatories of which he was such a master.

99

'I am truly obliged by Guilland, and your preface to Hallam is full of pith and point. I look for your notes as apples of gold. "Diffidence was never more out of season and place and I beg for them soon. Yes, I possess Sorel's " Question d'Orient" (June 18, 1912).

'You will receive in two or three days from the printers slips of my enlarged address. I should be much your debtor if you could by and bye, at your leisure, read the thing over and favour me with any critical remarks that may occur to you. The more blunt and candid, the better. It may well happen that the piece will never see the light, for I am deeply dissatisfied with its want alike of structure and of sharp edge. For I mean to work at the portions on Progress and the State. They are too crude as they stand.

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