o
be, not a fine gentleman, but a sturdy Englishman.

On much the same principle the public-house as a place of resort is
justified to the villager. I have already shown how it serves him for
entertainment instead of newspaper, or book, or theatre; and here,
again, he has a long-standing country tradition to support him. In spite
of reformers on the one hand, and on the other hand that tendency of
"the trade," which is spoiling the public-house as a place of
comfortable rest by frowning upon customers who stay too long and drink
too little--in spite of these discouragements, the villagers still
cannot believe that what was good enough for their fathers is not good
enough for themselves. It might not be equally good if they wished to be
"superior persons," but for the modest needs of people like themselves
they think it should serve. So they go to the public-house just as their
fathers did, content to miss the approval of the cultured, so long as
they can do as well as those worthies. Of course, if they ever analyzed
their impressions, they must often go home discerning that they had been
disappointed; that the company had been dull and the comfort small; that
they had got less conviviality than they wanted, and more of the drink
that should have been only its excuse; but as they are never
introspective, so the disappointment goes unnoticed, and leads to no
disillusionment.

VI

WAYS AND MEANS

Before going farther I must try to give some account of the ways and
means of the villagers, although, obviously, in a population so
heterogeneous, nothing short of a scientific survey on the lines pursued
by Sir Charles Booth or Mr. Rowntree could be of much value in this
direction. The observations to be offered here pretend to no such
authority. They have been collected at random, and subjected to no
tests, and they refer almost exclusively to the "unskilled" labouring
people.

During twenty years there have not been many fluctuations in the price
of a day's labour in the parish, but probably on the whole there has
been a slight increase. The increase, however, is very uncertain. While
the South African War was in progress, and afterwards when Bordon Camp
was building, eight miles away, labour did indeed seem to profit. But
then came the inevitable trade depression, work grew scarce, and by the
summer of 1909 wages had dropped to something less than they had been
before the war. I heard, for instance, of a man--o