And in Wiltshire, again, another observer can show the two great wants of the labourer still unsatisfied--Hope and a Home. He laments the passing of the old village gentry, who still had some sympathy and channels of communication with the labourer; and the substitution for them of the large farmer, who utterly hates and despises the class beneath him. “‘As long as a man stays on the land, he can’t call his soul his own,’ is an expression often heard among the poor.” He exhibits the striking contrast between the brother and sister: the sister who has “gone into service,” and found a demand for her work, and acquired under such conditions hope, independence, and a vigour of mind; the brother left on the fields, with the prospect before him of unchanging manual labour, at unchanging, scanty wages, until the workhouse absorbs him at the end. He shows the tragedy of the mere material collapse in the material conditions; village after village, in which no new cottages have been built for a hundred years; crumbling walls, falling into decay; crowded families, with all the starved life and degradation inevitably associated with such overcrowding; the whole presenting an aspect of fatigue and of decline. “To outsiders, who live in country villages, the wonder is not why many leave, but why any stay.” He will not agree that this is merely the normal condition of the rural population, as seen through jaundiced eyes. Once there was life in rural England. That life is vanishing like a dream. “‘Still as a slave before his lord,’ represents the attitude of the farm hand in the presence of his employer. No sheep before her shearers was ever more dumb than the milkers and carters and ploughmen at the village meetings to which their masters choose to summon them. They are cowed. It is to this that the race has come whom Froissart has described as ‘_le plus périlleux peuple qui soit au monde, et plus outrageux et orgueilleux_.’ Pride is dead in their souls.”[15]