A dominant note of the English character is kindliness. Animals are treated in England better than anywhere else in the world; the ordinary sleekness of the English horse and the serene confidence in human nature of the London cat are two outward and visible signs of the absence of cruelty in the national character. This kindliness makes more tolerable, and softens considerably what would be otherwise the intolerable gulf between rich and poor. England, taking into consideration population and area, is the richest country in the world, I suppose; yet it has a proportion of its population sunk in poverty--"the submerged tenth" one social observer (making a rather pessimistic calculation) called them. English statesmanship has so far failed to grapple successfully with the pauper population, and the even more pitiful class which struggles grimly on the edge of pauperism; but the English kindliness attempts to mollify the situation with vast organised charities, private and public, and makes it just tolerable. But even so it is painful: yet has to be faced to get to a true picture of England. I spent the late months of autumn one year in looking into the case of the unemployed and the casual workers; tramping the north country with them and following them then on their pilgrimage to London. With the first hint of winter the unemployed or the casual worker who knows the rules of the game heads for London. In the summer and the autumn he has wandered the country-side, working more or less regularly as he tramped, in potato fields, turnip fields, hop gardens, cornfields. It is a steadily narrowing opportunity, this casual agricultural work. With each year more and more of England's fruit, hops, vegetables, roots, and corn are grown abroad. To some extent, also, labour-saving machinery is displacing the manual worker where the tillage of the soil still survives. But there is surprisingly little machinery used in British agriculture as compared with that of Canada, the United States, and Australia. The very small farms do not allow of the economical use of machines. Some crops are still cut by scythes; a reaper and binder is less common than the simple reaper which cuts the corn and leaves it to be gathered and tied by a harvest hand.