Page:Over fen and wold; (IA overfenwold00hissiala).pdf/74

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

with uncomplainingly, or otherwise. It seems to me that the best way of stopping the emigration from the country to the town is to make the country more attractive to the countryman by housing him better. "But cottages don't pay," as a landlord once informed me, and in this age it is difficult to make men enter into philanthropic enterprises—unless they return a certain per cent! A money-*making generation likes to mix up philanthropy with profit—to do good openly and make it pay privately!

From the agricultural labourer upwards to the farmer, and from the farmer to the landowner, is an easy and natural transition. Now, since I commenced taking my holidays on the road several years ago, agricultural depression has, alas! gradually deepened, and my driving tours in rural England have brought me into frequent contact with both landowner and tenant farmer, and now and again with that sadly growing rarity the independent and sturdy yeoman who farms his own little freehold, perchance held by his ancestors for long centuries; with all of these I have conversed about the "bad times," and have obtained, I think, a fairly comprehensive view of the situation from each standpoint. Endeavouring, as far as is possible with fallible human nature, to take the unprejudiced position of a perfectly neutral on-*looker—a position that has caused me in turn to heartily sympathise with each party—the conclusion that I have reluctantly come to is this, that unless a great war should be a disturbing factor in