golf-courses, gamekeepers, gardeners, armies of industrious servants, excursionists, hospitable entertainment of country house-parties--we can discern the passing of a race of men. From every region of southern England comes the same testimony. “There is no social life at all,” writes a Somerset clergyman. “A village which once fed, clothed, policed, and regulated itself cannot now dig its own wells or build its own barns. Still less can it act its own dramas, build its own church, or organise its own work and play. It is pathetically helpless in everything.” He sees no forces in being adequate to arrest this prolonged secular decline. “As things go on now,” is his forecast, “we shall have empty fields, except for a few shepherds and herdsmen, in all the green of England. Nomadic herds will sweep over the country, sowing, shearing, grass-cutting, reaping and binding with machines: a system which does not make for health, peace, discipline, nobleness of life.” “England is bleeding at the arteries, and it is her reddest blood which is flowing away.”[13] In rural Essex another observer finds the land becoming “one vast wilderness,” “a retreat for foxes and a shelter for conies”: with the houses tumbling into decay, no new houses built, apathy settling down like a grey cloud over all. “The sturdy sons of the village have fled; they have left behind the old men, the lame, the mentally deficient, the vicious, the born tired.” Farm buildings and cottages are rapidly going to pieces. He notes the steady increase in the agricultural returns of “Land laid down to grass.” “It would be better described,” he declares, “as land which has laid itself down to twitch and thistle.” He heaps scorn upon “those glowing patriots who, in their anxiety to build up an Empire, have been grabbing at continents and lost their own land.”[14]