114 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE 



evicted from their farms after the famine, and 

 the same economic process is still going on. 

 Occasionally, the Labour Party have sent 

 down one of their Members of Parliament 

 into an agricultural district, but the experi- 

 ment has not been attended with much success. 

 Mr. Pointer, M.P., arrived at Bicester, in Ox- 

 fordshire, some three years ago, in the very 

 centre of an agricultural district, but his 

 excellent speech was rendered inaudible by 

 every form of uproar, which ultimately took 

 the form of open violence. Undeterred by 

 this failure, Mr. Pointer tried again : but 

 again the effort ended in a complete fiasco. 

 Socialism is not yet understood in our villages 

 either by rich or poor, and the leaders of the 

 Labour Party have at present no time, amid 

 the calls of the industrial centres, to extend 

 their missionary work in thinly populated 

 rural areas. The ordinary leaders of village 

 politics, Liberal or Tory, have not got far in 

 their conception of the Socialist creed beyond 

 Punch's definition of it as " Atheism, free 

 love and death to King George V." 



The labourer of the villages is essentially, 

 though well worth knowing, a hard man to 

 know. Long centuries of oppression and 

 neglect have left their mark on him, and unless 

 one has time and patience it is difficult to 



