f well established is probably
as hopelessly immovable a thing as the forces of progressive change will
have to encounter. The Arcadian healthiness and simplicity of the small
holder, and the usefulness of little hands about him, naturally results
in his keeping the population on his plot up to the limit of bare
subsistence. He avoids over-education, and his beasts live with him and
his children in a natural kindly manner. He will have no idlers, and
even grand-mamma goes weeding. His nett produce is less than the
production of the larger methods, but his gross is greater, and usually
it is mortgaged more or less. Along the selvage of many of the new roads
we have foretold, his hens will peck and his children beg, far into the
coming decades. This simple, virtuous, open-air life is to be found
ripening in the north of France and Belgium, it culminated in Ireland in
the famine years, it has held its own in China--with a use of female
infanticide--for immemorable ages, and a number of excellent persons are
endeavouring to establish it in England at the present time. At the Cape
of Good Hope, under British rule, Kaffirs are being settled upon little
inalienable holdings that must inevitably develop in the same
direction, and over the Southern States the nigger squats and
multiplies. It is fairly certain that these stagnant ponds of
population, which will grow until public intelligence rises to the pitch
of draining them, will on a greater scale parallel in the twentieth
century the soon-to-be-dispersed urban slums of the nineteenth. But I do
not see how they can obstruct, more than locally, the reorganization of
agriculture and horticulture upon the ampler and more economical lines
mechanism permits, or prevent the development of a type of agriculturist
as adaptable, alert, intelligent, unprejudiced, and modest as the coming
engineer.

Another great section of the community, the military element, will also
fall within the attraction of this possible synthesis, and will
inevitably undergo profound modification. Of the probable development of
warfare a later chapter shall treat, and here it will suffice to point
out that at present science stands proffering the soldier vague, vast
possibilities of mechanism, and, so far, he has accepted practically
nothing but rifles which he cannot sight and guns that he does not learn
to move about. It is quite possible the sailor would be in the like
case, but for the exceptional conditio