so skilfully, and with so splendidly assumed an air of philanthropy, that the worker on the land did not even recognise the instrument wherewith we destroyed him. He has been the victim of political factions--of politicians who have sacrificed the State to party. The Conservatives not unnaturally made the monopoly in land a tenet of their faith, and resisted every claim on the part of the poor to call any portion of England, however small, their own; the Liberals made the policy of Free Trade an inviolable doctrine, and though that policy mainly enriched the capitalist, they assumed in its support the semblance of enthusiasm for humanity, if not of the passion of religion. But between the two, as between the upper and nether millstone, the rural population of England has been ground to powder. Not for the first time in history the desolation of a kingdom has been wrought by time-serving politicians. {62} And with the devastation which our national policy thus wrought in the countryside there passed away, slowly but steadily, the ancient landowners. These men had in their veins the life-blood of England; they built up the Empire and sent forth their sons to be the 'frontiersmen of all the world.' Innumerable ties bound them to the people. Squire and peasant were at one in love of the land, and each knew that his welfare was bound up with that of the other. But the lands had to be sold, and the new-rich came from the cities and replaced the aristocracy of the countryside. They had no ties binding them to the sons of the soil. They knew not the traditions to which the landlord and tenant were loyal. They only sought to transplant a bit of the city into the heart of the country. It was then that the country folk awoke to the insecurity of their lives. At a word they were sent forth homeless wanderers. The hint of a right to be vindicated brought down unemployment and eviction on the head of {63} England's freedmen. The cottager in the country could no longer call his soul his own. In the city he could at least call his thoughts his own, and he could give them utterance in stumbling words without incurring the risk of being made homeless. No wonder the rural labourer escaped for his life. The nation, as usual, awoke too late to the realisation of its ebbing life. It began to make provision for the people of England acquiring a moiety of the land of England. But it is easy to turn a smiling land into a wilderness; to convert the wilderness back into a garden is the baffling problem. 'To-day,' writes Mr. Masterman, 'land is being slowly and laboriously offered to the people, a generation after the people who once hungered for that offer have flung themselves into the cities or beyond the sea.' Any parvenu can sweep the population of a parish forth into Poplar and Lambeth; it may well pass the wit of man to bring their children back from Poplar and Lambeth to the land. {64} II