Even in my younger days the possession of land meant power and social prestige; and people really lived on it. But the change was coming rapidly; and the writers I have quoted show us the scene just before it was about to shift. Among all classes there has been a rush from the country to the towns; and there has been a growing tendency to regard rural England rather as a playground than as the source of the nation’s best inhabitants. This tendency has unfortunately, in my judgment at least, been fostered by a legislation which has refused to give agriculture the encouragement it requires, with the result that our villages in England almost all tell the same tale of falling population. Perhaps one of the most urgent problems before our English statesmen is how to attract people back to the beautiful country, which under modern economic conditions has been so much deserted. I have now brought my lectures to an end. I have tried to place before you as vivid a picture as I could of English life in a bygone age; and if I have not made it adequate to the expectation of my auditors, I have at least a hope that I have aroused sufficient interest to make some here desire to know more of the subject. For the study of social life is, in truth, a most important branch of history. It is almost impossible to form a just conception of the men of any age from documents unless one can gain an idea what manner of men they really are. Unless we have this knowledge, no amount of research, no ingenuity or discrimination will assist us to arrive at an apprehension of the truth. For it is not possible to understand men’s actions unless we have that sympathy which makes us realise that under different conditions they were human beings not, after all, unlike what we ourselves should have been in their circumstances. And it is in the novel, the private letter, the caricature, the half-forgotten jest or good story, that we are helped to depict the men and women of the past. A pleasing task awaits me; namely, to thank you for the welcome you have given me as a stranger, when I first appeared before you, for the patience you have shown in listening to what I had to say, for the evident sympathy and good feeling you have shown throughout these lectures. Let me say that I felt deeply the honour conferred on me by the offer of a Lowell lectureship, that I enjoyed, in these days of great sorrow and anxiety shared by all my countrymen, the distraction which I found in preparing for my responsible task; and that though, I confess, I first entered this room with no little trepidation and wondered how I could possibly interest complete strangers, I now feel that I am speaking to friends, who have, by their kindness to an Englishman with whose very name they must have been unfamiliar, demonstrated the reality of the ties which bind the two Englands, the old and the new, each to the other. Printed in the United States of America.