The greatest tragedy of our day is that the English race which has conquered the fourth of the world's area has lost its own land. In the course of a hundred years the spoliation of well-nigh the whole nation has been consummated. The villages and rural parishes of England which once teemed with life are left to decay. The life and the wealth which reared the parish churches of England--those monuments of vanished piety and of forgotten arts--and which produced with skilled handicraft the 'ornaments and church furniture, bells and candlesticks, crosses and organs, and tapestry and banners,' have ebbed away, leaving behind them only a {57} memory. The world can nowhere show a desolation such as has overtaken rural England. Elsewhere, be it France or Germany, Serbia or Bulgaria, the cottages are scattered over close-tilled land, and the labour of man is rewarded by the earth yielding its increase. But England presents the spectacle of decayed cottages, of vast spaces 'laid down to grass,' of stately houses with the silence of tree-shaded parks round about them, and of a land which yields no longer food but sport. 'As things go now,' writes an observer, 'we shall have empty fields, except for a few shepherds and herdsmen in all the green of England.' In his book, _The Condition of England_, Mr. C. F. G. Masterman has presented a picture of rural decay which is steeped in tears. 'A peasantry, unique in Europe in its complete divorce from the land, lacking ownership of cottage or tiniest plot of ground, finds no longer any attraction in the cheerless toil of the agricultural labourer upon scant weekly wages'--thus Mr. Masterman. If {58} the life-blood of a nation be derived from the clean countryside, then 'England is bleeding at the arteries, and it is her reddest blood which is flowing away.'