This is not only the _natural_ progress, but it _has been_ the progress in England. The blame is not justly imputed to 'Squire Charington and his like: the blame belongs to the infernal stock-jobbing system. There was no reason to expect, that farmers would not endeavour to keep pace, in point of show and luxury, with fund-holders, and with all the tribes that _war_ and _taxes_ created. Farmers were not the authors of the mischief; and _now_ they are compelled to shut the labourers out of their houses, and to pinch them in their wages in order to be able to pay their own taxes; and, besides this, the manners and the principles of the working class are so changed, that a sort of self-preservation bids the farmer (especially in some counties) to keep them from beneath his roof. I could not quit this farmhouse without reflecting on the thousands of scores of bacon and thousands of bushels of bread that had been eaten from the long oak-table which, I said to myself, is now perhaps, going at last, to the bottom of a bridge that some stock-jobber will stick up over an artificial river in his cockney garden. "_By ---- it shan't_," said I, almost in a real passion: and so I requested a friend to buy it for me; and if he do so, I will take it to Kensington, or to Fleet-street, and keep it for the good it has done in the world. When the old farmhouses are down (and down they must come in time) what a miserable thing the country will be! Those that are now erected are mere painted shells, with a Mistress within, who is stuck up in a place she calls a _parlour_, with, if she have children, the "young ladies and gentlemen" about her: some showy chairs and a sofa (a _sofa_ by all means): half a dozen prints in gilt frames hanging up: some swinging book-shelves with novels and tracts upon them: a dinner brought in by a girl that is perhaps better "educated" than she: two or three nick-nacks to eat instead of a piece of bacon and a pudding: the house too neat for a dirty-shoed carter to be allowed to come into; and everything proclaiming to every sensible beholder, that there is here a constant anxiety to make a _show_ not warranted by the reality. The children (which is the worst part of it) are all too clever to _work_: they are all to be _gentlefolks_. Go to plough! Good God! What, "young gentlemen" go to plough! They become _clerks_, or some skimmy-dish thing or other. They flee from the dirty _work_ as cunning horses do from the bridle. What misery is all this! What a mass of materials for producing that general and _dreadful convulsion_ that must, first or last, come and blow this funding and jobbing and enslaving and starving system to atoms!