Altered Circumstances" and "The Resulting Needs." The
earlier chapters, which immediately follow this one under the heading
"The Present Time," are merely descriptive of the people and their
conditions as I know them now, and aim at nothing more than to pave the
way for a clearer understanding of the main subject.

II

THE PRESENT TIME

II

SELF-RELIANCE

There is a chapter in Dickens's _Hard Times_ which tells how it was
discovered that somebody had fallen down a disused mine-shaft, and how
the rescue was valiantly effected by a few men who had to be awakened
for that end from their drunken Sunday afternoon sleep. Sobered by the
dangers they foresaw, these men ran to the pit-mouth, pushed straight to
the centre of the crowd there, and fell to work quietly with their ropes
and winches. As you read, you seem to see them, spitting on their great
hands while they knot the ropes, listening attentively to the doctor as
to an equal, and speaking in undertones to one another, but regardless
of the remarks of the bystanders. The best man amongst them, says
Dickens--and you know it to be true: Dickens could have told you the
men's names and life-history had he chosen--the best man amongst them
was the greatest drunkard of the lot; and when his heroic work was done,
nobody seems to have taken any farther notice of him.

These were Northcountrymen; but there was a quality about them of which
I have often been reminded, in watching or hearing tell of the men in
this Surrey village. It is the thing that most impresses all who come
into any sympathetic contact with my neighbours their readiness to make
a start at the dangerous or disagreeable task when others would be still
talking, and their apparent expectation that they will succeed. In this
spirit they occasionally do things quite as well worthy of mention as
the incident described by Dickens. I remember looking on myself at just
such another piece of work, in the town a mile away from here, one
winter day. The sluggish "river," as we call it, which flows amongst
meadows on the south of the town, is usually fordable beside one of the
bridges, and men with horses and carts as often as not drive through the
ford, instead of going over the bridge. But on the day I am recalling
floods had so swollen the stream that a horse and cart were swept down
under the narrow bridge, and had got jammed there, the driver having
escaped over the iron railings of the bridge as