House and Garden 
Milk can be bought; and, strange as it may seem 
to dwellers in towns, that is by no means the universal 
experience in' the country. Within ten miles is 
another village, where no milk could be bought until 
the parson, rightly seeing how wrong it was that 
children should be reared without the chance of 
absorbing the one food which is absolutely essential 
to the proper development of a child, himself estab¬ 
lished a dairy and sold the milk. His successor, 
being a townsman pure and simple, does not keep 
cows, would indeed probably lose a good deal of 
money if he did, and the village, which could afford 
to buy milk, is reduced to the condensed stuff again. 
It is said to be very nutritious; but, as one soon 
discovers at sea, it becomes monotonous to the point 
of nausea. Here milk is to be bought by those who 
have the money; but such luxury as the delivery of 
milk at the consumer’s door is unheard of. Nor is 
the supply always to be relied upon, for during the 
last winter, when the few milk-sellers had apparently 
conspired to have most of their cows dry simulta¬ 
neously, even our modest supply by the'day could not 
be got from one establishment, but bad to be con¬ 
tributed by two. 
Sanitation is, it needs hardly to be said, held to 
be a matter of no importance, and neither village nor 
hamlet has any uniform system of drainage. Some 
of us use cesspools, others do without them, and 
nobody cares much. Epidemics, when they come, 
are severe; but they are regarded as a “judgment,” 
as indeed, being the just punishment of neglect, they 
are; but that is not what those who use the term 
intend to convey. Substantially, too, there is no 
adequate water-supply for a population of some 
hundreds of persons. There is, it is true, a village 
pump, fully half a mile distant from some of the 
cottages, of which the water is officially described 
as “passable” and no more. There are also a 
number of wells, most of them suspect, some of them 
condemned a year or two ago by the sanitary author¬ 
ity. For my own part I have “two wells of excellent 
water,” according to the conditions under which the 
house, now mine, was formerly offered for sale, but 
on analysis, when there had not been any chance of 
pollution for years from the house, which was empty, 
or from middens appertaining to it, for there were 
none, it was condemned without hesitation on the 
ground that it was gravely polluted by nitrites. So 
we get water for the house, as a favour, from a 
neighbour whose well is placed above the midden and 
pigsties which probably poison mine. Even that we 
dare not analyse; and there are many cottages which 
have no water-supply at all. It may be said that 
this is an illegal state of things; that owners are 
bound to supply water if it can be done “at reason¬ 
able cost, ” and so on. The answer is that a labourer 
at los. (^2.50) a week cannot afford to set the law in 
motion at all; least of all can he do so when the 
defendant landlord is also his employer. Moreover, 
so long as the authority which is supposed to look to 
these matters is local, it is idle to expect that any¬ 
thing will be done; for the question whether money 
shall be expended lies with the largest ratepayers, 
directly or indirectly, and, to put the matter bluntly, 
they are too ignorant to care whether the water they 
drink themselves is pure, and therefore they are not 
in the least likely to recommend a public water- 
supply to be provided for others principally at their 
cost. This particular danger, that of permitting 
local government to be in the hands of men who are 
directly interested in keeping down the expenditure of 
money locally, is, however, so far-reaching in its 
ramifications that it must not be entered into here. 
Some years ago the “Morning Post” coined the 
expression “The Rural Exodus,” and it served well 
to represent a state of things in the country districts 
of England which was then deplored by every 
thoughtful man and woman in England. That 
condition of affairs is unhappily still more con¬ 
spicuous in many parts of the country now, and in 
others, where it is perhaps less conspicuous, the evil 
is almost as great as it is in those villages where there 
is no melancholy series of derelict tenements to pro¬ 
claim, albeit silently, that the habitation of the sons 
of the soil knows them no more. Year by year the 
agricultural population of the villages continues to 
dwindle away, and the congestion of the towns by 
men and women who are but partially and spasmod¬ 
ically employed becomes more manifest and alarm¬ 
ing. From this in its turn come a risen as well as a 
rising generation reared in an unhealthy environ¬ 
ment, grown and growing to feeble maturity without 
an adequate supply of light, air, and exercise. Next 
come Royal Commissions to inquire into the phys¬ 
ical degeneration of our race, so that for the future 
the Blue-books may give chapter and verse in detail 
concerning a general truth that is painfully obvious; 
and all the time earnest and clever essayists busy 
their brains in seeking to find the cause of the deser¬ 
tion of the country by the sons and daughters of the 
soil, and in striving to suggest a remedy. The dul- 
ness of life in country villages and its deadly monot¬ 
ony is the most favoured explanation of the exodus. 
In the towns are to be found abundant opportunities 
for social intercourse, good and bad, lighted streets, 
amusements of a hundred kinds, many of them 
gratuitous, countless institutions for the public bene¬ 
fit. In a word, there is always something to look 
at, something to rouse the interest of the poorest. 
In the country there is nothing, or next to nothing, 
save the daily round and the common task, and they 
are, as Mr. Henry James would say, “of a monot¬ 
ony” which is hardly to be borne. The point at 
which they cannot be endured at all comes when the 
sometime villager who has prospered—he who fails 
never reappears—comes down in patronising mood, 
142 
