er, has gradually passed away. As I shall
show in another chapter, the labourer may now take but little interest
and but little pride in his work; but the change in that direction is
not more pronounced than is the change in the relations between the
villagers and the employing classes. It is a cruel evil that the folk of
the valley have suffered there. No longer are they a group whose
peculiarities are respected while their qualities are esteemed. In their
intercourse with the outer world they have become, as it were, degraded,
humiliated; and when they go out of the valley to earn wages, it is to
take the position of an inferior and almost servile race. The reason is
that the employing class, as a whole, has moved on, leaving the
labourers where they were, until now a great gulf divides them. Merely
in relative wealth, if that were all, the difference has widened
enormously. Seventy or eighty years ago, I have heard say, the
shopkeeper in the town who had as much as a hundred pounds put by was
thought a rich man. There are now many artisans there whose savings
exceed that figure, while the property of the townsmen who employ labour
is, of course, valued often in thousands. The labouring people alone
remain without savings, as poor as their grandfathers when the common
was first enclosed.

But it is a question of civilization far more than of wealth that now
divides the employing classes from the employed. The former have
discarded much of their provincialism; they are astir with ambitions and
ideas at which the old town would have stood aghast. In beliefs and in
tastes they are a new people. They have new kinds of knowledge; almost
one may say that they use their brains in new ways; and the result is
that between them and the village labourer mutual understanding has
broken down. How far the separation has gone is betrayed in the fact
that the countrified speech, common to village and town fifty years ago,
has become a subject of derision to the town-people, forgetful of their
own ancestry. So, in field and street and shop, the two kinds of folk
meet face to face, not with an outlook, and hardly with a speech, which
both can appreciate, but like distinct races, the one dominant, the
other subject.

And, all but inevitably, the breach is daily widened by the conditions
on which the new civilization of the employing class is based. For, with
all its good features, it is rather a barbaric civilization, in this
sense--t