ating into an
entirely offensive one. There is no hope surrounding these doings.

Nor do they fail only because they have become dissociated from
pleasanter work. Even the best of them are actually less interesting in
themselves. Look, for instance, at cooking. That cheap and coarse food
which women now buy because its coarseness makes it cheap is of a
quality to discourage any cook; it is common to the village--the rough
rations of the poor; and the trumpery crocks and tins, the bad coal, and
worse fireplaces, do nothing to make the preparation of it more
agreeable. With needlework it is the same story: commercial thrift has
degraded that craft. She must be an enthusiast indeed who would expend
any art of the needle upon the shabby second-hand garments, or the
shoddy new ones, which have to content the labourer's wife. And if the
family clothes are not good to make or to mend, neither are they good to
wash, or worth displaying on the clothes-lines in the hope of exciting
envy in neighbours.

Not at first, but in due time, inefficiency was added to the other
causes which tended to make housework unpalatable to the women, and of
no use to them as an uplifting experience. The inefficiency could hardly
be avoided. The mothers, employed in the fields, had but little chance
of teaching their daughters; and these daughters, growing up, to marry
and to follow field-work themselves, kept their cottages as best they
could, by the light of nature. In not a few cases all sense of an art of
well-doing in such matters was lost, and the home became a place to
sleep in, to feed in; not a place in which to try to live well. Perhaps
the lowest ebb was reached some fifteen or twenty years ago. By then
that feeling of belonging intimately to the countryside and sharing its
traditions had died out, and nothing had come to replace it. For all
practical purposes there were no traditions, nor were there any true
country-folk living a peculiar and satisfying life of their own. The
women had become merely the "hands" or employees of farmers, struggling
to make up money enough every week for a wretched shopping. With
health, a joking humour, and the inevitable habit of self-reliance, they
preserved a careless good-temper, and they had not much time to realize
their own plight; but it was, for all that, a squalid life that many of
them led, a neglected life. Only in a very few cottages did there linger
any serviceable memory of better things.