he logic of their
class, such men as these may in resisting innovations go to lengths
which may appear foolish and wrong to others who live in a widely
different social atmosphere. To some extent the bitter opposition to
change in the position of the labourer, which is thrown in the teeth of
the tenant farmer, is the outcome of these very centuries of steady
adherence to all that they believed upright and manly.

Another name on my list has been known at one spot for fully two hundred
years. These men attained a position beyond that of yeoman, but they
never sank beneath it. The rise of many of the great county families
really dates from the success of some ancestor, or the collective
success of a series of ancestors, in agriculture. They perhaps claim
some knight or nobleman as the founder of the race, although he may have
really done nothing for the practical advantage of the family; the true
founders being merely proprietors of land, dignified as J.P.'s, and
sometimes sheriffs, throwing off branches into the clerical and legal
professions. The real ancestor was the sturdy yeoman who accumulated the
money to purchase the farm he tilled, and whose successors had the good
sense to go on adding acre to acre till they finally expanded into the
wide domains of the modern squire. Not the knight whose effigy in brass
paves the aisle of the parish church laid the corner-stone of the wealth
and power of to-day, but the shrewd and close-fisted producer and dealer
in wool and corn. Their true claim to aristocratic privileges and
importance is the sense of centuries of independence. These others of
whom we have spoken, the yeoman who never aspired beyond the yeoman's
position, are as ancient and as "worshipful"--to use an old and disused
term--as they. I do not instance these descents of three and two hundred
years as extraordinary, because I believe that they could be paralleled
and even extended by inquiry, but because they came under my own
observation. There are others on the list ranging from one hundred and
sixty down to sixty and eighty years of continued occupation. But not to
go into details, I reckon on an average that thirty names out of a
hundred have been the occupiers for three generations; forty for two
generations; twenty for one hundred and fifty years; and ten are new
comers. But a still more curious and instructive fact is the permanence
of certain names over a wide section of country; so much so that in
places