270 BIED LIFE IN ENGLAND. 



teaching of Will o' the Wisps. To begin with, his stomach 

 is empty, and this is a condition utterly at variance with the 

 cheerful belief in those good times to-morrow which some 

 counsel him to accept in place of dinner to-day. He wants 

 well-paid work, that he may live as comfortably as he lived 

 thirty years ago ; not the miserable occasional job a 

 mockery of steady employment too often marking the 

 condition of the market in rural districts. The labour 

 representatives, or rather the representatives of labour 

 discontent, tell him that wealth is stagnant in the social 

 spheres above, and if the land is to be fertilized, it must be 

 by such a golden shower as would result from puncturing 

 the money-bags of the wealthy. The attributes of opulence, 

 aggressive everywhere in this fair and delightful land, seem 

 to endorse the crude logic of these democrats. Even such 

 follies as " game for every one," or " three acres and a cow," 

 are not above the hungry wonder of Hodge, whose little 

 ones, in a land overflowing with milk and honey, pine on 

 " skimmed Simpson " as blue as ever disgusted a cockney, 

 and unpaid-for bread from speculative village bakeries "as 

 dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage " which Jacques 

 scorned and far less wholesome ! Nor is it politic to whittle 

 those privileges which were but unquestioned rights of 

 "rude forefathers of the hamlets." Those countrymen are 

 but mortal after all, and are full of the passions of their 

 kind, the egotism, and even the pride which Pope suggests 

 marks a fool equally in fustian or broadcloth ; they feel the 

 tight grip which modern competition has put upon every 

 scrap of land, more, perhaps, than some of their friends 

 know; and it saps their belief in the kindly fellowship of 

 those above them when the valleys blossom with forbidding 

 notice boards, and coppice and common, where children 

 played and winter firewood came from, glisten in the 

 sunshine a maze of steel-barbed fencing. 



This is the tune to which the agitator of more pay and 

 less work for horny-handed sons of toil tunes his fitful lute. 



