But the reform which he had most at heart he never lived to carry out. The industry of straw-plaiting, which prevails in the neighbourhood, while it enables the women and girls to earn high wages, makes them bad housewives, all their cooking and cleaning being neglected, while they run in and out of neighbours’ houses, gossiping and plaiting. In the hope of curing this evil he looked forward to fitting up a large barn in the village as a sort of general meeting-place. Here, when he had made the roof air-tight, and laid down a good floor, there was to be a stove for cooking and baking, and appliances for instruction in other household work. Under his wife and sister there were to be “cooking classes, sewing classes, and singing classes; and, in the evenings, entertainments for the poor people, a piano and night classes, sometimes theatricals, and often concerts, and when the boys wanted to dance they were to have their dances there. He used to think that constant meetings in the barn would humanize us all, and be a very pleasant thing for making rich and poor meet on equal terms.” It is perhaps vain to dwell upon such things, but I cannot help hoping that some day those of you who have the opportunity of realizing such plans may remember to what purposes the big barn was once destined. Of one other part of his village work, his Sunday evening classes for the big boys, I shall have to speak presently. But you must not suppose from anything in this chapter that he ever lost his interest in politics, or public affairs. He was always a keen politician, retaining, however, all his early beliefs. “You have all got far beyond me,” he writes to his sister; “and my dear mother turning Radical in her old age is delightful.” Perhaps the most ardent politician amongst us all is the best witness to call on this subject. “I don’t think anything was more remarkable about George than his politics. He, who was so good an old Tory in many ways, showed that he believed in a universal principle and duty underlying all the political opinions about the best means of carrying out reforms. I think it is very rare, when people are discussing politics, to find this constant recognition of something beyond party nostrums. But (as in his father) I have always detected it in George; and, when I have got very hot whilst propounding Radicalism against all the rest here, have always found sympathy from him at the bottom; and I have always felt at last how much more truly liberal he was at heart than we Radicals, because we are always wanting to force on our opinions our own way, whilst in him I always recognized a divine sort of justice and patience, which used to make me feel very conceited, and wanting in faith. He was born with aristocratic instincts, being by nature intensely sensitive and refined, with a loathing of anything blatant and in bad taste, and with an intense love of justice; and the unwise, violent, foolish way in which many men like —— expound