, of our people
may be able to set up homes for themselves in their own country.' He
believed that 'the greater his freedom, the greater his attachment
to home, the more settled the labourer,' the firmer would become the
position of labourer, farmer, and landowner. Yet an advanced
reformer of our own day--Mr. Montague Fordham in 'Mother Earth'--has
still to cry the same thing in the wilderness; and it is still true
that 'you cannot have a fixed population unless it has a home, and
the labouring population is practically homeless.' On the other
hand, it should be remembered that Jefferies also says: 'Parks and
woods are becoming of priceless value; we should have to preserve a
few landowners, if only to have parks and woods.'

These later articles are far more persuasive than their
predecessors, for here there is no doubt, not merely that they are
sincere, but that they are the unprejudiced opinion of the man as
well as of the agriculturist. He has ceased to be concerned only
with things as they are, or as they may be made to-morrow. He allows
himself to think as much of justice as of expediency, of what is
fitting as well as of what is at once possible. The phrases,
'Sentiment is more stubborn than fact,' 'Service is no inheritance,'
'I do not want any paupers,' 'I should not like men under my thumb,'
'Men demanding to be paid in full for full work, but refusing
favours and petty assistance to be recouped hereafter; ... men with
the franchise, voting under the protection of the ballot, and voting
first and foremost for the demolition of the infernal Poor Law and
workhouse system'--these simple phrases fall with peculiar and even
pathetic force, in their context, from the mystic optimist whom pain
was ripening fast in those last years. Even here he uses phrases
like 'the serious work which brings in money' and commends 'push and
enterprise' as a substitute for 'the slow plodding manner of the
labourer.' But these are exceptional. As to the writing itself, of
which this is an example,

'By home life I mean that which gathers about a house, however
small, standing in its own grounds. Something comes into
existence about such a house, an influence, a pervading feeling,
like some warm colour softening the whole, tinting the lichen on
the wall, even the very smoke-marks on the chimney. It is home,
and the men and women born there will never lose the tone it has
given them. Such homes are the strength of a lan