l me
one thing, Lord Saltire; you have travelled in many countries. Is
there any land, east or west, that can give us what this dear old
England does--settled order, in which each man knows his place and his
duties? It is so easy to be good in England."

"Well, no. It is the first country in the world. A few bad harvests
would make a hell of it, though."

This was written at a time, remember, when the invention of machinery,
the rapid growth of industrialism, and the increasing mobility of the
population of the world, had broken down the old order of things, had
created large fortunes and reduced thousands to destitution; when men
poured into cities and lived crowded and unhealthy in slums, when the
opening phase of the grim battle between employer and employed was
fought, when trade-unionism was wrested from an unwilling Government,
when housing regulations, health regulations, and poor-laws, were
incapable of dealing with the wars of misery, poverty, and sickness,
they were designed to meet, when little by little vested interests and
class prejudices were brought before the judgment of reason and found
wanting--it was in such a period of our national history that Harry
Kingsley could write of "settled order, in which each one knows his
place and his duties."

This attitude of mind is characteristic of a whole school of
mid-Victorian novelists, and George Meredith--whose earliest novel,
"Richard Feverel," was published about this date--broke many a lance
against it, and scolded us and laughed at us, and upset our dignified
conception of ourselves, and sometimes, in his irritable affection for
his countrymen, took a bludgeon to us, and broke our heads.

I find it also in another and much greater novel, to attack which in a
book dealing with this corner of Devon and Somerset is indeed a sort of
_lese-majeste_--for, to most people, who says "Exmoor" says "Lorna
Doone."

Yet rereading the book in these present days--and even amid the scenes
whose beauty and whose character Blackmore has so firmly reproduced--I
find the parochialism, the self-satisfaction, and the prejudice, which
lumps the whole un-English world, with its revolutions, and ideals, and
racial problems, under one heading, as "dam-furriners." John Ridd is
English, therefore he despises what is not English; he is rather
stupid, therefore he despises intellect. "She was born next day with
more mind than body--the worst thing that can befall a man," h