eration; it is a commercial affair; a clerk going to his office
has as much reason as the labourer to welcome the morning's call to
work. As in the clerk's case, so in the labourer's: the act or fruition
of living is postponed during the hours in which the living is being
earned; between the two processes a sharp line of division is drawn;
and it is not until the clock strikes, and the leisure begins, that a
man may remember that he is a man, and try to make a success of living.
Hence the truth of what I say: the problem of using leisure is a new one
in the village. Deprived, by the economic changes which have gone over
them, of any keen enjoyment of life while at work, the labourers must
make up for the deprivation when work is over, or not at all. Naturally
enough, in the absence of any traditions to guide them, they fail. But
self-respect forbids the old solution. To feed and go to bed would be to
shirk the problem, not to solve it.

So much turns upon a proper appreciation of these truths that it will be
well to illustrate them from real life, contrasting the old against the
new. Fortunately the means are available. Modernized people acquainted
with leisure are in every cottage, while as for the others, the valley
still contains a few elderly men whose lives are reminiscent of the
earlier day. Accordingly I shall finish this chapter by giving an
account of one of these latter, so that in the next chapter the
different position of the present-day labourers may be more exactly
understood.

The man I have in mind--I will rename him Turner--belongs to one of the
old families of the village, and inherited from his father a cottage and
an acre or so of ground--probably mortgaged--together with a horse and
cart, a donkey, a cow or two, a few pigs, and a fair stock of the usual
rustic tools and implements. Unluckily for him, he inherited no
traditions--there were none in his family--to teach him how to use these
possessions for making a money profit; so that, trying to go on in the
old way, as if the world were not changing all round him, he muddled
away his chances, and by the time that he was fifty had no property left
that was worth any creditor's notice. The loss, however, came too late
to have much effect on his habits. And now that he is but the weekly
tenant of a tiny cottage, and owns no more than a donkey and cart and a
few rabbits and fowls, he is just the same sort of man that he used to
be in prosperity--thrift