262 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



industrial centres working men can afford to snap their ringers at 

 any pretence of superiority affected by others. But in the country 

 we have not yet arrived at that point. " Yokel " still continues to 

 be considered " yokel." Landlords, parsons, employers, other 

 residents may be kind, considerate, well-wishing — as a rule they 

 are. But they are often enough apt to be demonstratively con- 

 descending. It is that condescension which wrings the withers. 

 It is generally insisted on social grounds — I have seen in a publica- 

 tion issuing from Whitehall Place a distinct warning in this sense 

 put forward — that such " condescension must cease." It must, 

 indeed, if the hopes connected with our small-holdings policy are 

 to be realised. But it must cease on economic as well as on social 

 grounds, for there is nothing to discourage labour and reduce its 

 productiveness more than a show of caste superiority. Times have 

 changed. We have all become " citizens " now. We are wont to 

 pride ourselves upon our " democratic " principles. We flaunt 

 them in the face of Germans, Austrians, and other " barbarians." 

 What we want to do is also to practise them. Under our small- 

 holdings policy, which we have advisedly adopted as the rural 

 realisation of " democratic principle," the rural labourer of to-day 

 is destined to become, as he has done for generations past in Cumber- 

 land and some other districts, the small-holder of to-morrow, and 

 the farmer of the day after — in himself as good a man as his present 

 employer. How many farmers, indeed, are there who have not 

 risen from the ranks of labour ? Democracy means the breaking 

 down of social barriers, the establishment of social equality. There 

 is no extravagant levelling in this, no setting of ignorance above 

 knowledge. Education, superior culture, superior knowledge of 

 business, wealth — all these endowments will tell, without their 

 being artificially set off by class pretensions. By our small- holdings 

 policy we have opened a career to the agricultural labourer in which 

 his position as one serving for promotion mast be recognised. 

 We want to make his uprising as easy as we can. In Napoleon's 

 words, " Every soldier in this army wants to be made to feel that 

 he carries a potential marshal's baton in his knapsack." 



However, there is something more substantial than class diffe- 

 rences which causes dissatisfaction and resentment. For centuries 

 past the working man has given his labour for what it would just 

 fetch in the market, in which for a long time supply was superior 

 to demand, and therefore his merchandise sold like the proverbial 

 " drug." Conditions have changed. And now working men all 

 round put in their claim for what Professor Foxwell, in his trans- 



