ents of vanished
piety and of forgotten arts--and which produced with skilled handicraft
the 'ornaments and church furniture, bells and candlesticks, crosses
and organs, and tapestry and banners,' have ebbed away, leaving behind
them only a {57} memory. The world can nowhere show a desolation such
as has overtaken rural England. Elsewhere, be it France or Germany,
Serbia or Bulgaria, the cottages are scattered over close-tilled land,
and the labour of man is rewarded by the earth yielding its increase.
But England presents the spectacle of decayed cottages, of vast spaces
'laid down to grass,' of stately houses with the silence of tree-shaded
parks round about them, and of a land which yields no longer food but
sport. 'As things go now,' writes an observer, 'we shall have empty
fields, except for a few shepherds and herdsmen in all the green of
England.' In his book, _The Condition of England_, Mr. C. F. G.
Masterman has presented a picture of rural decay which is steeped in
tears. 'A peasantry, unique in Europe in its complete divorce from the
land, lacking ownership of cottage or tiniest plot of ground, finds no
longer any attraction in the cheerless toil of the agricultural
labourer upon scant weekly wages'--thus Mr. Masterman. If {58} the
life-blood of a nation be derived from the clean countryside, then
'England is bleeding at the arteries, and it is her reddest blood which
is flowing away.'

It is to the Moloch of an industrial civilisation that this sacrifice
of life has been made. The desolation was wrought because men, in
their haste to become rich, were blind to the true values of labour.
They forgot that the primary work of man is to produce food, and that
upon the production of food the whole structure of the commonwealth
depends. Cities endure because, far beyond their ken, the land yields
wheat and fruit and supports wandering herds. All other work is
parasitic; that work alone is essential. But a perverted civilisation
sacrificed the primary to the parasitic, and poured its rewards into
the lap of the workers who added nothing to the world's true riches.
The road to success and honour lay only through the city. Formerly the
gentleman was he who tilled the ground; in our day the man who ploughs
and reaps {59} is deemed a boor. Clean hands and clean linen are now
the badges of a gentleman. The sense of the dignity of making the soil
yield its riches has vanished from among us. Everything is or