. And if they will
not do this willingly, then shall they be coerced, or at least kept in
order, by "temperance" and other "reforming" legislation, and by the
police.

XII

THE HUMILIATED

The effects of this "inferiority" which has been thrust upon the
villagers are not exactly conspicuous in any particular direction. As it
has been shown already, the people themselves seem almost unaware of any
grievance in the matter, the change having come upon them too gradually
for it to be sharply felt. They bear no malice against their employers.
You would hardly learn, from anything that they consciously say or do,
that in becoming so humiliated they have been hurt in their feelings, or
have found it necessary to change their habits.

Indeed, the positive alteration in their manners, by which I mean the
adoption of new ways in place of old ones, has probably not amounted to
a great deal. I admit that I have no means of estimating how much it
does amount to. During fifty years, in which every cottager must now and
then have become aware of constraint put upon him or her by the superior
attitude of the employing class, it is quite possible that there have
been innumerable small concessions and adaptations of manner, and that
these have accumulated into a general change which would surprise us if
it could be measured. But I incline to think that the effects of
class-pressure have been chiefly negative; that, while employers have
been adopting new modes of life, all that has happened to the labouring
folk here in the valley is that this or that habit, found inexpedient at
last, has been quietly dropped. A sort of reserve in the village temper,
a want of gaiety, a subdued air--this, which one cannot help observing,
is probably the shadow cast upon the people from the upraised
middle-class. It looks suggestive, too. Yet, upon examining it, one
fails to find in it any definite token that would show exactly how and
where the village temper has been touched, or in what light "superior"
persons are regarded in the cottages. The people appear enigmatic. They
keep their own counsel. Whether they are bewildered or amused at the
behaviour of employers, or alarmed or embittered by it, or actually
indifferent to it, no sign escapes them when members of the employing
class are by.

In these circumstances, it is instructive to turn aside for a while from
the grown-up people of the village, and to consider their children;
because t