England is not a country of small proprietors. Without committing the mistake, so common amongst foreigners, of believing that there are no small landowners in England, we know that they are not so numerous as in France, and therefore that the intense local affection of the peasant has fewer chances of developing itself. Again, the population of England is less and less a stationary population, it becomes constantly more urban and more migratory. The lower and middle classes change their place of residence with a facility unknown to the yeomanry of former times. It seems to be a matter of indifference to them whether they will live in one ugly and smoky street or in another ugly and smoky street, and why indeed should we expect their affections to take root in a “wilderness of bricks”? Nor do they limit themselves to the same town. They change towns almost as easily as streets on the slightest prospect of increased income, and often merely for the sake of the change itself, to break the monotony of a life destitute of local interests and local attachments. In its extreme development the facility in removing that characterises the modern Englishman of the unsettled class will include not merely the United Kingdom, but the most remote dependencies of the British Empire. The following is a case well known to me; it is given here as an extreme case, not as an average one, but it is thoroughly English, and most remote from the stay-at-home habits of the French. [Sidenote: History of an English middle-class Family.] [Sidenote: Constant Changes of Address.] [Sidenote: Condition of Feeling incompatible with Local Attachments.]