108 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE 



is the fact that, as a general rule, the Tory 

 candidate is a man who lives in the county. 

 On the other hand a large proportion of the 

 Liberals who seek the suffrages of the rural 

 parishes are more or less strangers, and hi 

 many cases chosen with more apparent regard 

 to the fact that they can pay their own 

 expenses than that they are either resident in 

 the county or acquainted with its needs and 

 conditions. Local and personal sentiment are 

 not extinct even in men and women who 

 spend their lives in the depressing depths of 

 rural poverty, and many of our rural electors 

 consistently follow the lead of the squire at 

 election times, even when as is not always 

 the case they believe in the absolute secrecy 

 of the ballot. " The labourers' patient toil," 

 says Mr. Phillips in the English Review, 

 " in itself unrewarded, is consummated in 

 the free step and gallant bearing of the squire, 

 who rides as straight as he shoots, and has a 

 neighbour's sympathy for all that grows in the 

 country." The force of these personal ties 

 is diminishing year by year. Not only is the 

 growth of independence inevitable from the 

 gradual spread of education and fuller contact 

 with the cities, but a new type of landlord has 

 appeared within the last fifty years. The 

 feudal loyalty which constrained a village to 



