of money, he began to buy land and build
houses, nothing would persuade the illiterate members of the society
that he was not speculating with their funds. Audited accounts had no
meaning for them; possibly the fact that he was doing a service for no
pay struck them as suspicious; at any rate they murmured so openly that
he threw up his office. Whom they have got in his place, and whether
they are suspicious of him too, I do not know. My point is that, while
modern thrift obliges them to enter into these fellowships, they remain,
for mere want of book-learning, unable to help themselves, and dependent
on the aid of friends from the middle or employing classes. In other
words, the greater number of the Englishmen in the village have to stand
aside and see their own affairs controlled for them by outsiders.

This is so wholly the case in some matters that nobody ever dreams of
consulting the people who are chiefly concerned in them. In the
education of their children, for one thing, they have no voice at all.
It is administered in a standardized form by a committee of middle-class
people appointed in the neighbouring town, who carry out provisions
which originate from unapproachable permanent officials at Whitehall.
The County Council may modify the programme a little; His Majesty's
inspectors--strangers to the people, and ignorant of their needs--issue
fiats in the form of advice to the school teachers; and meanwhile the
parents of the children acquiesce, not always approving what is done,
but accepting it as if it were a law of fate that all such things must
be arranged over their heads by the classes who have book-learning.

And this customary attitude of waiting for what the "educated" may do
for them renders them apathetic where they might be, and where it is
highly important that they should be, reliant upon their own
initiative--I mean, in political action. The majority of the labourers
in the village have extremely crude ideas of representative government.
A candidate for Parliament is not, in their eyes, a servant whom they
may appoint to give voice to their own wishes; he is a "gentleman" who,
probably from motives of self-interest, comes to them as a sort of quack
doctor, with occult remedies, which they may have if they will vote for
him, and which might possibly do them good. Hence they hardly look upon
the Government as an instrument at all under the control of people like
themselves; they view it, rather, a