The decay of the great agricultural interest is a calamity which has been coming upon us slowly, though with a continually accelerated movement. This is the reason, I suppose, why the country regards it with so strange an apathy. It is not only that the landlords are rapidly encountering ruin, that the farmers are losing all their capital, and that labourers are daily turned out of work and driven away to the great towns; the very existence of the country towns is threatened; the investments which depend on rent and estates are threatened; colleges and charities are losing their endowments; worst of all, the rustic, the backbone and support of the country, who has always supplied all our armies with all our soldiers, is fast disappearing from the land. I confess that, if something does not happen to stay the ruin of agriculture in these Islands, I think the end of their greatness will not be far off. Perhaps I think and speak as a fool; but it seems to me that a cheap loaf is dearly bought if, among other blessings, it deprives the countryside of its village folk, strong and healthy, and the empire of its stalwart soldiers. As for the House of Lords and the English aristocracy, they cannot survive the day when the farms cannot even support the hands that till the soil, and are left untilled and uncultivated. * * * * * There are, to make an end, two changes especially for which we can never be sufficiently thankful. The first is the decay of the old Calvinism; that gone, the chief terror of life is gone too; the chief sting of death is gone; the terrible, awful question which reasoning man could not refrain from asking is gone too.