Where the money can still be obtained from external sources--the new wealth of the towns, or tribute from new nations abroad--some semblance of that feudal tradition still remain. Cottages are let at less than their market prices, old men and women on the estate are comfortably pensioned, there are almshouses and model villages and “Church” schools, a deferential and grateful population, and all the apparatus of the model village, guided and controlled by the occupant of the great house. Yet even from these well-favoured regions the census returns reveal the population fleeing from the neighbourhood as if from some raging pestilence: making what haste they can to be gone. The smaller “landed gentry” have been most hardly hit by agricultural depressions, the general fall in prices, and the obligations of a growing standard of luxury, confronting a falling income. Here the estates are encumbered or falling into decay. The physical aspect of comfort and pleasant non-economic industry is far less apparent. There is evidence, even in the outward scene, of the malady within. In the case of some of the larger estates, and a great number of the smaller, the land is being transferred to those who, having made fortunes in trade, business, or financial speculation, have desire of settling down into the life of the country gentleman. In many of the home counties, for example, the bulk of the older estates have passed into the hands of the owners of the “new wealth,” the Plutocracy which looks for its consummation in ownership of a portion of the land of England. Many of them are assiduous in rural welfare: some have taken over what remain of the feudal tradition as a “going concern,” and delight in the fresh air, the opportunities for “sport” and exercise, the ample bestowal of patronage, and all the manifold energies and charities which flow from the great house into the surrounding countryside. There are some also who introduce a breath of fresh air--even an unashamed Democratic spirit--into the somewhat heavy atmosphere of the remoter regions of rural England. To others, however, all this is frankly a toy and a plaything. They have purchased an estate, as they would purchase food or raiment, for the purposes of enjoyment. They convert the house into a tiny piece of the city, transplanted to the healthier air of the fields. They entertain themselves and their friends in the heart of an England, for whose vanishing traditions and enthusiasms they care not at all. In that England, indeed, everything seems to arrive too late. Men only awaken to the necessity of doing something after the opportunity for that particular something has already gone. The rural Labourers’ Union succeeded and collapsed just before the great fall in prices: instead of effecting its objects at the time when wages could easily have been raised out of the natural profits of the land. To-day land is being slowly and laboriously offered to