THE COUNTRY CHURCH PROGRAMME 179 



and the sciences to render valuable service in the devel- 

 opment of agriculture wrote over the portals' of its 

 rural hostelries : 



Here man more purely lives, less oft doth fall, 

 More promptly rises, walks with nicer heed, 

 More safely rests, dies happier.* 



The worth of rural life is seen more clearly still by 

 contrast through the bare, bald recital of Frederic Har- 

 rison's tremendous indictment of modern industrial con- 

 ditions in British cities : " To me at least it would be 

 enough to condemn society as hardly an advance upon 

 slavery or serfdom, if the permanent condition of indus- 

 try were to be that which we now behold that ninety 

 per cent, of the actual producers of wealth have no 

 home that they can call their own beyond the end of 

 the week ; have no bit of soil or so much as a room that 

 belongs to them; have nothing of value of any kind 

 except as much furniture as will go in a cart ; have the 

 precarious chance of weekly wages which barely suffice 

 to keep them in health ; are housed for the most part in 

 places that no man thinks fit for his horse ; are separ- 

 ated by so narrow a margin from destitution that a 

 month of bad trade, sickness, or unexpected loss brings 

 them face to face with hunger and pauperism. This is 

 the normal state of the average workman."f Thorold 

 Rogers, too, declares, " There is every reason to fear 

 that it is the case that there is collected a population 

 in our great towns that equals in amount the whole of 

 those who lived in England six centuries ago, whose 



* Wordsworth, " Sonnets." 



T Address before Industrial Remuneration Congress, quoted 

 in " Social Advance," by David Watson, p. 91. 



