overdrawn. But for
one who sees and thinks life in terms of manhood and womanhood, it cannot
be overdrawn. Such hordes of beastly wretchedness and inarticulate
misery are no compensation for a millionaire brewer who lives in a West
End palace, sates himself with the sensuous delights of London's golden
theatres, hobnobs with lordlings and princelings, and is knighted by the
king. Wins his spurs--God forbid! In old time the great blonde beasts
rode in the battle's van and won their spurs by cleaving men from pate to
chine. And, after all, it is finer to kill a strong man with a clean-
slicing blow of singing steel than to make a beast of him, and of his
seed through the generations, by the artful and spidery manipulation of
industry and politics.

But to return to the hops. Here the divorcement from the soil is as
apparent as in every other agricultural line in England. While the
manufacture of beer steadily increases, the growth of hops steadily
decreases. In 1835 the acreage under hops was 71,327. To-day it stands
at 48,024, a decrease of 3103 from the acreage of last year.

Small as the acreage is this year, a poor summer and terrible storms
reduced the yield. This misfortune is divided between the people who own
hops and the people who pick hops. The owners perforce must put up with
less of the nicer things of life, the pickers with less grub, of which,
in the best of times, they never get enough. For weary weeks headlines
like the following have appeared in the London papers.-

TRAMPS PLENTIFUL, BUT THE HOPS ARE FEW AND NOT YET READY.

Then there have been numberless paragraphs like this:-

From the neighbourhood of the hop fields comes news of a distressing
nature. The bright outburst of the last two days has sent many
hundreds of hoppers into Kent, who will have to wait till the fields
are ready for them. At Dover the number of vagrants in the workhouse
is treble the number there last year at this time, and in other towns
the lateness of the season is responsible for a large increase in the
number of casuals.

To cap their wretchedness, when at last the picking had begun, hops and
hoppers were well-nigh swept away by a frightful storm of wind, rain, and
hail. The hops were stripped clean from the poles and pounded into the
earth, while the hoppers, seeking shelter from the stinging hail, were
close to drowning in their huts and camps on the low-lying ground. Their
cond