Indeed, if I may venture on a quite innocent paradox, there is a kind of slowness which takes the form of rapidity in reducing one's pace. Such slowness is nothing but inverted speed, and is highly effective in farming, in war, and in many other things. And of Mr Jeremy we may say that whereas, on the one hand, he was extremely slow in the acquisition of new knowledge, on the other he was equally quick to check himself in the application of such knowledge as he possessed already. This gave him, in the eyes of superficial observers, the appearance of being "slow." At the same time it enabled him to make a better thing out of farming than any of his neighbours, some of whom had been trained in Agricultural Colleges. I have to confess that my acquaintance with Mr Jeremy has not been without a certain demoralising effect. It has corrupted the brightness of many comfortable truths which excellent preceptors taught me in my youth. I will not say that my hold on these truths has altogether vanished; but, thanks to Mr Jeremy's influence, I have learned to see them in so many new lights, and with so many qualifications, that for purposes of platform oratory on all questions connected with the land and its uses I have entirely lost the very little effectiveness I once had. There was a time when if anyone mentioned the land I always wanted to make a speech. Now I feel--what no doubt I ought to have felt then--that I must hold my tongue. To be quite frank, my views on the land have become confused, hesitating, and politically ineffective. That a farmer owning his own land was _cæteris paribus_ necessarily better off than a tenant once seemed to me a truth so plain as not to be worth discussion. But if I had to speak on that point now, I should hesitate and hedge about to a degree which would force any intelligent audience to regard me as a fool. Instead of speaking out loud and strong for peasant proprietorship, I should be thinking all the time of the three peasant proprietors in our neighbourhood--George Corey, Charles Narroway, and Billy Hoare, who are the meanest, the stingiest, the most underhand and generally despicable rascals I have ever met. Were a resolution placed before the meeting in favour of bringing the townspeople back on to the land, I should say in support that while it is infinitely sad to see the real peasantry drifting into the towns, it is yet worse to see people like Prendergast, the ex-draper, drifting out of the towns and setting up as country gentlemen. I should want to tell the audience all about Prendergast and the hideous human packing-case he has built on the opposite hillside; how he swindled the village shopkeeper out of twenty pounds; how he sweats his labourers just as he sweated the poor girls who used to serve behind his counter; how he told me to go to the devil when I begged him not to build his abominable house where it would spoil the view: and then I should want to add a few