When the change came from class legislation to _laissez faire_, his position was little improved. Centuries of oppression were followed by generations of neglect. Thus the English workers have suffered in succession from evils of two kinds, from the evils of oppression and from the evils of neglect. This aspect of English history is summed up and condemned in the single fact that we had no national system of education till 1870, a fact all the more striking because Scotland, though much later in its political and economic development, had an enlightened system of education at a very early date. Factory workers gained much dining the nineteenth century. But even yet the State has hardly done anything substantial for the rural workers. Scarcely a voice has been raised for a class which has borne the chief burden of national industry, of colonisation and war, which for so many centuries carried Church and State, aristocracy and squirearchy, on its much-enduring shoulders. Some of us hoped that in 1885 the time had at last come. We all know what happened to defer it again. Will the State never give heed to such a duty till the demand grows clamorous and agitation menacing? No class has done so much and received so little as the rural workers. Every man connected with the ruling class in England should be ashamed to look one of the peasantry in the face. It is the continual neglect of the needs and claims of the people that makes a peaceful change difficult and prepares for revolution. There are however, many very promising symptoms. Among these we may note a growing spirit of conciliation and of sympathy with the claims of labour, shown particularly in the friendly and courteous reception accorded to the newly founded Labour Party. In the ruling and possessing classes we may observe an increasing recognition of the necessity to make substantial concessions to the needs and aspirations of the workers. One of the brightest of recent symptoms was the atmosphere, enlightened, sympathetic, and generous, which pervaded the discussions at the Pan-Anglican Congress in 1908. It was a sign of the times. No one could accuse the Congress of being a revolutionary gathering. We may expect that the influence of its members among the conservative and influential classes all over the English-speaking world will have good results.