The dweller among country sights and scenes is an idealist--sometimes even a poet, though he may never express himself in words--and many an ordinary labourer turning the rich clods of soil with the plough can be found who will at times say things both trenchant and eloquent which will give food for thought to the most cultivated stylist. Some people imagine that cities educate, and that the country does not; but one may question whether it is not quite the other way about. In any case, the life of the country makes for health and strength, and these are two potent factors for happiness. No man can be happy or contented if he is ailing and weakly, and in our many “new” systems of education, which are now being so much talked of, it is to be hoped that health for the children will be the first thing to be considered and maintained. Here I may perhaps touch upon a point where one may trust that “all is well with England,” in the immense change the war has wrought as regards the position of women in the State. Some years ago I was one of the many who were strongly opposed to the “Votes for Women” movement, judging it to be wholly unnecessary. I had been brought up on the chivalric view of man as taken by Sir Walter Scott in his immortal romances, and my idea, gathered from these exalted specimens of the race, was that as man was always ready to worship woman it seemed invidious on her part to contend with him in his own particular sphere. But when it was forced on me that, more often than not, man was more ready to deride rather than worship woman, that the special “strain” of Walter Scott’s heroes was in Walter Scott’s delightful imagination only, and that as a matter of fact men denied to women such lawful honours as they might win through intellectual attainment, and that in certain forms of their legal procedure women were classed with “children, criminals, and lunatics,” I began to change my opinion.