viii PREFACE 



welding together every class of the rural population 

 in a common effort to promote the industrial welfare 

 of the locality and to carry to the homes of the 

 humblest of its workers a due proportion of the 

 prosperity and happiness which such solidarity is 

 bound to engender. 



The old Squires of England were not always wise 

 and were sometimes despotic, but they were, as a 

 class, imbued with a traditional sense of honour, 

 integrity, patriotism and sympathetic knowledge of 

 their poorer neighbours which are not so markedly 

 characteristic of the more progressive plutocracy which 

 has largely replaced them. 



The war will in its results afford unparalleled 

 opportunities of awakening to new vigour the life 

 of our villages and the development of a healthy, 

 happy and largely increased rural community. The 

 spirit of comradeship, self-denial, dogged courage and 

 simple piety is abroad in the land, and is growing 

 with every month of the present struggle for our 

 national existence. It must be the aim of well 

 informed rural reformers to turn this spirit to good 

 account, and seek not by restriction, still less by 

 penal legislation, but by mutual goodwill and 

 sympathy to combine the freedom of life, social 

 intercourse, innocent gaiety and simple religious faith 

 of mediaeval rural England with an economic im- 



