the surface will realise what has happened. The serene life of rural England, viewed from the country house or city observatory, will continue undisturbed. There will be no revolution, red flags, open riots, rick-burning. But the people will quietly melt away, into the cities, beyond the sea. The last of the Sibylline Books will have been flung into the flames. What this vanishing life signifies, in its strength and in its weaknesses, can only be revealed to those who through months and years have made it the subject of sympathetic study. The landlord, the farmer, the clergyman, the newspaper correspondent primed with casual conversation in the village inn, think that they know the labourer. They probably know nothing whatever about him. With his limited vocabulary, with his racial distrust of the stranger, and all of another class, with a mind which maintains such reticence except in moments of overpowering emotion, that labourer stands, a perplexing enigmatic figure alone in a voluble, self-analysing world. In certain sympathetic studies he is revealed in his strength and his weakness, by those who are able to get behind much that is superficially unattractive to the solid endurance and courage and helpfulness beneath it all. In his _Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer_, Mr. “George Bourne” has presented an illuminating picture of an old man who himself stands for the last relic of a vanishing race. He has collected and treasured the sayings of “Bettesworth” as he passes slowly downward in the day’s decline; remarks trivial or commonplace, worldly wisdom, strange superstitions, acceptance of the sunshine, bewilderment before the hostile forces of the world. There are years passed in almost daily intercourse before his master discovers that Bettesworth had once fought through the Crimean war. That experience had made no permanent impression of horror or of pride. The events of the day, which influence men’s passions in some mobile, distant universe, filter down into this quiet country like the noise of something far away. And the South African War, and the death of the Queen, and a General Election scarcely do more than ripple the surface of these deep waters. Of more importance is the untimely summer rain which ruins the harvest, dispossession from a cottage, the illness of a wife, the calamity of advancing age. The heroic patience and endurance of the labourer is here revealed, in face of accepted and inevitable change. He resists the embraces of the workhouse with that dogged despair with which the English rural poor have resisted the “Bastilles” since their foundation. He clings to life and its possible activities, continuing his work, suffering and half blind, meeting death when it comes as the poor have usually met it, without hope and without fear; his mind at the end with the past rather than with the future. The Pagan remains, and refuses to be silenced by the long centuries of Christian tradition.