STIRRINGS OF NEW LIFE. 149 



please their masters. Their wives, though under no legal obliga- 

 tion to do so, must still go out to field labour or ' give offence.' 

 Opposition in politics may involve ' a march,' as they have 

 learnt to call a compulsory flitting. The Parish Council gives 

 the master abundant tests of submission. ' I didn't know as he 

 was agin' her,' said a labourer of fifty-five, telling how he unad- 

 visedly ' held up his hand ' for a lady who was a candidate for a 

 scat in the village parliament. ' But didn't he just give it to I 

 atenvards ! ' ' Still as a slave before his lord ' represents the 

 attitude of the farm hand in the presence of his employer. No 

 sheep before her shearers was ever more dumb than the milkers 

 and carters and ploughmen at the village meetings to which 

 their masters may choose to summon them. They arc cowed. 

 It is to this that the race have come, whom Froissart described 

 as ' le plus perillcux peuple qui soit au monde, et plus outrageux 

 et orgueilleux.' Pride is dead in their souls. 



" Is there no germ of independence within them that may 

 still be fostered and vivified ? Parish Councils were intended 

 for this very purpose and Parish Councils have signally failed. 

 As long as the Land is in the hands of a small class straightly 

 banded together for the maintenance of their position and their 

 authority, the condition of the labourers must remain practically 

 one of serfdom. The monopoly of great farmers must be broken 

 up before the dawn of hope can rise upon the English peasant. 

 And great farmers are upheld by the whole Conservative party 

 in England. They play the part of the ' Undertakers ' at the 

 election of James I's second Parliament. As a class they 

 ' undertake ' that the vote of the villages shall be Conservative. 

 Their power of paralysing anything like freedom of electoral 

 choice in their dependents is a weapon in the hands of a political 

 party. But even if Hope were again to shine upon the peasant, 

 is there anything left within him to which Hope could appeal ? 



" Yes, deep in the heart of the country labourer there glimmers 

 still a tiny spark from which we may yet rekindle the sacred lire 

 of independence and self-reverence. That it exists at all is a. 

 miracle. It has gone on living through the generations of 

 hopeless drudgery in which every high aspiration was squeezed 

 by famine out of the soul of the farmer's serf, a survival from the 

 clays when an able-bodied Englishman bred on and to the Land, 

 might cherish the hope of one day calling a corner of it: his own. 

 at least as the tenant of a landlord without personal interest in 

 the degradation of his dependents. It is the Love of the Land. 

 I know nothing more touching than the rare expression of this 

 feeling by men to whom one would naturally expect ' the Land 

 to be much the same as ' the shirt,' to a Jew-sweated seamstress 

 in the East End. ' A /><'.->/, '>/,,'/ bit of land ! 'says an old labourer 

 admiringly, as he watches the plough-share turn the rich furrow. 



