294 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



Why, he asks, should the council not possess its own 

 village ? Why should we not live in our own houses ? 

 He even asks, Can an owner of this kind of property be 

 permitted to refuse to sell ? Which is a pertinent but 

 saucy question for this yeoman's son to ask. He ven- 

 tures to suggest that ten or twenty out of a thousand 

 acres should be purchasable by force ' at a given and 

 moderate price,' and points out, with naive and most 

 troublesome logic, that the railways have as great a 

 privilege. As things are, the labourer is a hand-to-mouth 

 nomad bound for the workhouse — the word ' pauper ' 

 Jefferies detests so much that it is painful for him to use 

 it — ' because the owner of ten thousand acres is by no 

 means obliged to part with a minutest fragment of it.' 

 The Poor Laws would, he thinks, be unnecessary if there 

 were a good system of insurance. He complains of the 

 'glacier-like' movements of Government, of the 'mediaeval 

 law ' which prevents the use of steam on the common 

 roads. The Church has lost all hold of him, and, not only 

 as an artist, he dislikes the very towers and steeples. 



' I wish the trees, the elms, would grow tall enough and 

 thick enough to hide the steeples and towers M^hich stand 

 up so stiff and stark, and bare and cold, some of them 

 blunted and squab, some of them sharp enough to impale, 

 with no more shape than a walking-stick, ferrule upwards, 

 every one of them out of proportion and jarring to the 

 eye. If by good fortune you can find a spot where you 

 cannot see a steeple or a church-tower, where you can 

 see only fields and woods, you will find it so much more 

 beautiful, for Nature has made it of its kind perfect. 

 The dim sea is always so beautiful a view because it is 

 not disfigured by these buildings. In the ships men live, 

 in the houses among the trees they live ; these steeples 

 and towers are empty, and no spirit can dwell in that 

 which is out of proportion. Scarcely anyone can paint a 

 picture of the country without sticking in one of these 

 repellent structures. The oast houses, whose red cones 

 are so plentiful in Kent and Sussex, have quite a different 



