worshipping always only the strongest, discovered its leaders deported over so unsatisfying a controversy as the vindication of a public right. There was a general village uprising in the Election of 1885, when the newly enfranchised labourers turned eagerly to the promise of independence upon the land. There was another village uprising in 1906, when the labourers turned sullenly away from the proposal to tax their food. But the one was an uprising of Hope: the other, of Fear. In the intervening period there had vanished, from large areas of rural England, the possibility of the reconstruction of a rural civilisation. “The human wealth of a populous countryside, in which all classes lived, and could live, at peace for centuries--that,” says Mr. Ensor, “is our achievement as a nation, the source and condition of our other greatnesses, the bark on whose fragments, ‘majestic though in ruin,’ we can still found, if not our loudest, at least our most legitimate fame.”[17] All that is over. It would appear to be over for ever. A few old men, gathered round the hearthstone of the village inn, testify in the nights of winter to the passing of a whole people. Already the manifestations of resistance and of aspiration, associated with the democratic victories of the last election, are sinking back into the older acquiescence: as the rulers of the countryside exhibit, by a combination of kindliness and austerity, how undesirable is such an overthrow of the accepted ways. Villas and country houses establish themselves in the heart of this departing race: in it, but not of it, as alien from its ancient ways as if dropped from the clouds into another world. Wandering machines, travelling with an incredible rate of speed, scramble and smash and shriek along all the rural ways. You can see them on a Sunday afternoon, piled twenty or thirty deep outside the new popular inns, while their occupants regale themselves within. You can see the evidence of their activity in the dust-laden hedges of the south country roads, a grey mud colour, with no evidence of green; in the ruined cottage gardens of the south country villages. From those villages themselves not only the evidence of activity has departed, but the very memories of it. They cannot, to-day, make the folklore popular songs. They cannot even cherish the folklore songs which were made by their fathers. And “few sadder or more thought-begetting experiences can be undergone,” is the testimony of a lover of this land, “than to sit in an inn in a remote country village, and hear rustics troll tin-kettle ditties about Seven Dials or the Old Kent Road.”