To be able to ride mile after mile, day after day, and see no living soul; to know that nothing can happen beyond birth and death, rain or drought; to live only with animals, and with two or three of your own kind, whose every vice and virtue, expression and thought you know as well as you know the nature of your own sheep and cows; to be a man or woman, with all the strong passions and instincts of your sex—all the stronger from the fact of living so perpetually among animals—and yet with no chance of honourable marriage before you; no games, no society, no diversion, no possibility of any change: if you could only realize it all—you women gossiping over your gates through the long summer evenings in England, with your children playing before you in the road; you men gathered round your village club or public-house fires, on cold winter nights, grumbling about the weather, discussing the news of the day together, walking home through the village, flinging a “goodnight” on this side and on that; all of you living your human, homely lives; every boy and girl with a sweetheart to walk out with on Sundays; and the squire and the parson at hand if you are in trouble, and a club doctor within reach if you are ill.—If you could only realize what it means, this awful loneliness of the far places of the Empire, you might be a little more contented with your own lot, and have more respect for the men and women who have fought through such frightful conditions, who have kept themselves and their children clean and sane, and with it all, helped to the making of a new nation. The question of eugenics is a difficult one for a mere scribbler to touch upon, but it seems strange that a people which is endeavouring so strenuously to keep itself entirely white—realizing fully the danger of mixed marriages—has not also realized more completely the grave danger arising from intermarriage—and worse—among these isolated families, {232} and the appalling percentage of lunatics which it produces. All this is but part of the crying need for closer settlement; it is also a proof of what I mentioned in my last chapter regarding the accommodation needed for agricultural labourers; the irrigation which will make closer settlement a possibility, and—conversely—the closer settlement which will make irrigation practicable. Still, I believe that married men with families, and not stray bachelors, are the people needed in the agricultural districts, or, to go even farther than this, little colonies of people from the same country, county, or village; while, on the whole, it is more in Southern France, Italy, and Spain, than in England that suitable families, with some knowledge of working in hot, dry climates and of the possibilities of irrigated land, are most likely to be found.