4 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



been witnessed and taken part in by him in sunny Languedoc and 

 gay Provence. 



The reason why things were not of the same cheering character 

 among ourselves was this, that upon all our rural life lay, like a 

 heavy weight, the incubus of the feudal system, handed down from 

 ancient times and appropriate to them, but not to ours, a veritable 

 stifling pall, under which there was no free breathing, and which in 

 its social aspect we have managed to retain longer than any other 

 nation. There is " feudalism " in northern Germany. But it does 

 not affect country life. It shows itself in military aspirations and 

 regime, and in politics. But so far as it could affect rural economy 

 the last relics of it were wiped out, even in backward Prussia, by the 

 Local Government Reform of 1875, which deprived " lords of the 

 manor " of their last privileges and made them simply " large 

 landowners " with no superior claim to anything. The privileges 

 of " nobility " had been abolished long before. The Italian landlord 

 is often grasping and oppressive. But that is as a question of money, 

 after the manner, not of a feudal tyrant, but of a usurer. He has 

 the land, which the poor rustic cannot do without. And the demand 

 for it — among a population, whose great industry, in the words of 

 Sydney Smith, applied to the Irish, is " the manufacture of children " 

 — is great. He deals with it sometimes with the greediness of a verit- 

 able Shylock. But the Italian rustic has the whole world open to 

 him. He is more versatile and more mobile than our sturdy country 

 labourer, who excels him in other qualities. He goes out into 

 distant parts, but almost invariably comes home again, bringing 

 money with him, and settling comfortably in a new, sufficiently 

 moneyed position. And at home he has learnt to beard his exacting 

 master by the use of co-operative settlements, such as we scarcely 

 yet know of here, but which have opened to him, by sheer self-help, 

 a gate to the realm of independence and sufficiency. 



Our own country life has retained all its essentially feudal features. 

 It means classes — landlords, tenants, labourers, three cast-iron types. 

 There are bulkheaded partitions between them — like the " gulf " 

 which separated Dives hopelessly from Lazarus. The interests of 

 landlords and tenants may sometimes blend, and there will be peace 

 so far. But the labourer has no one — in the country — with whom 

 to make common cause, and in such class-isolation he has remained. 



It cannot be contended, to put this point first, that this condition 

 of things, from which we are only just emerging in an unorganised 

 way, has proved conducive to the best possible agriculture. We 

 have become so used to this shape of the land system that we can 



