Rural England 
extends his sympathy to his former associates, and 
expatiates at length upon the contrast between the 
animation of life in London, Liverpool, or Birming¬ 
ham, by comparison with that of the country. 
Such being the explanation given, we see many 
most estimable efforts to exorcise the demon of dul- 
ness made by men and women who fondly hope that, 
if they succeed, the countrymen will stay in their 
native villages, will breathe sweet air unfouled by 
smoke, will sleep in daintily clean rooms with “open 
jasmine-muffled lattices” (as a matter of fact a rus¬ 
tic would sooner die at once than sleep in a room 
with the window open), and will develop, with the 
help of the country’s boundless store of nourishing 
food, the physical health and strength which are 
sadly to seek in the rising generation. So village 
clubs are organized, and the gentry devise concerts 
and theatricals in the village school, and the curate 
busies himself with his cricket club, and so on. 
Heaven forbid that I should say a single word to 
discourage any such endeavours to make life in the 
villages a trifle less dreary, or that I should deny their 
operation for good so far as they go. But the fact 
remains that the exodus continues, and it continues 
because dulness is but a part of the evil to be con¬ 
tended against, is, in truth, in far too many parts of 
rural England, the direct consequence of a disease 
which is always present to the mind of the patient 
except when kindly sleep knits up his ravelled sleeve. 
The plain and terrible truth of the matter is that, in 
districts far wider and more numerous than the 
kind dwellers in towns and casual visitors to our 
pretty villages can be expected to realise, the agri¬ 
cultural labourer, his wife, and his children are half- 
starved from the beginning to the end of life. Men 
do not earn anything approaching to a living wage, 
and that is why the best of them flock to the towns, 
many of them to be no more seen, and why the clubs 
and the concerts and the theatricals, and all the 
paraphernalia of healthy gaiety fail to produce all 
the desired effect. Panem et circenses was an 
intelligible cry; Circenses sine pane are an unin¬ 
tentional mockery and a failure. That is the hard 
and lamentable fact, and it is well that it should 
be known, since the wisest of physicians cannot pre¬ 
scribe effectually for the body politic, or for the phys¬ 
ical body, until the disease has been diagnosed 
with precision. 
To tell the squalid truth concerning the life of 
the country is not the fashion; and it is not at all a 
pleasant story in the telling; but it is a plain duty 
to make it known. The locality concerning the 
social state of which I have stated some very depress¬ 
ing facts is, perhaps, exceptional in its misfortunes, 
although it is more likely to be but an example in a 
fairly large class. No names have been mentioned 
that are not entirely fictitious, no topographical 
indications have been given by which a stranger could 
discover our home of poverty. A cap has been 
fitted to no man’s head; and, although facts care¬ 
fully ascertained must needs be stated, there is no 
desire to wound the susceptibilities of any living'"man. 
In fact, the whole object of writing is to make public 
the deplorable state of a humbleand,itisfeared,not an 
entirely exceptional community, in the hope that wiser 
men than I may be induced to devise some method 
for causing that, which is but too sadly true of the 
present, to be untrue and inconceivable in the future. 
* 
The Village Cross at Ludgershall, Wi tshire 
H 3 
