1 68 THE FAMILY AND THE NATION 



a healthy reluctance in landed and military families to 

 engage in commercial or industrial pursuits. More- 

 over, the country landowners as a class have shown 

 exceptional public spirit in the history of local govern- 

 ment throughout the last two centuries. The value of 

 their unpaid work to the community has been borne 

 witness to by competent and independent investigators.^ 

 The figures we have given to express the activities of 

 their sons show that the same sense of duty to the 

 community extended to national as well as to local 

 affairs. It is clearly not a coincidence that a time 

 when exceptional financial burdens, arising from both 

 economic and political causes, have fallen on the 

 shoulders of the country landowners, is marked also 

 by a decrease in the number of their offspring. 

 Simultaneously there has set in a want of elasticity 

 in the supply of candidates for two underpaid pro- 

 fessions, essential to the welfare of the community, 

 which unconsciously had relied to fill their ranks 

 largely on the patriotism and unselfish devotion to 

 duty of a class which, from a certain section of its 

 fellow-countrymen, has received little but misunder- 

 standing in return. 



In other professions, the dearth of duly qualified 

 candidates is not yet as pronounced as it is in the 

 Church and the Army. Other professions are better 

 paid, and hence can draw for a time on different classes, 

 as the supply of men, who would formerly have filled 

 them, contracts. 



The first-class Civil Service examinations show a fall 



1 See the Hittcry of Local Government — T^e County, by Sidney and Beatrice 



Webb. 



