d of men who once defended her? To me the
gradual return of the land to its primitive wildness is more than
depressing. There are districts on the borders of Hertford and Essex
which might make a sentimental traveller sit down and cry. It all
seems strange; it looks so poverty-stricken, so filthy, so sordid, so
like the site of a slum after all the houses have been levelled for a
dozen years; and this in the midst of our England! I say nothing about
land-laws and so forth, but I will say that those who fancy the towns
can survive when the farms are deserted are much mistaken. "Are we
wealthy?" "Yes," and "No." We are wealthy in the wrong places, and we
are poor in the wrong places; and the combination will end in mischief
unless we are very soon prepared to make an alteration in most of our
ways of living. In many respects it is a good world; but it might be
made better, nobler, finer in every quarter, if the poor would only
recognise wise and silent leaders, and use the laws which men have
made in order to repair the havoc which other men have also made.

XI.

THE VALUES OF LABOUR.

Only about a quarter-century ago unlearned men of ability would often
sigh and say, "Ah, if I was only a scholar!" Admirers of a clever and
illiterate workman often said, "Why, if he was a scholar, he would
make a fortune in business for himself!" Women mourned the lack of
learning in the same way, and I have heard good dames deplore the fact
that they could not read. I pity most profoundly those on whom the
light of knowledge has never shone kindly; and yet I have a comic sort
of misgiving lest in a short time a common cry may be, "Ah, if I was
only not a scholar!" The matchless topsy-turvydom which has marked the
passage of the last ten years, the tremendously accelerated velocity
with which labour is moving towards emancipation from all control,
have so confused things in general that an observer must stand back
and get a new focus before he can allow his mind to dwell on the
things that he sees. One day's issue of any good newspaper is enough
to show what a revolution is upon us, for we merely need to run the
eye down columns at random to pick out suggestive little scraps. At
present we cannot get that "larger view" about which Dr. W.B.
Carpenter used to talk; he was wont to study hundreds and thousands of
soundings and measurements piecemeal, and the chaos of figures
gradually took form until at length the doctor had in his