Every observer, in this and its hundred similar fellows, can see family affection, endurance, kindliness, and patience beyond all praise; a resistance (even in the last extremity) to the triumphant powers of darkness. What is more difficult to show is any interpretation of the whole business, an ideal which can illuminate the present disability, or a vision in which to-day’s efforts will appear intelligible in the light of an end. Lacking such vision, the verdict of a nineteenth-century prophet still sounds mournful over much of industrial England that abides unchanged. “The two most frightful things I have ever yet seen in my life,” wrote Ruskin, “are the south-eastern suburbs of Bradford, and the scene from Wakefield Bridge, by the chapel; yet I cannot but more and more reverence the fierce courage and industry, the gloomy endurance, and the infinite mechanical ingenuity of the great centres, as one reverences the fervid labours of a wasp’s nest, though the end of all is only a noxious lump of clay.” Yet all England has not yet been roofed over and become subservient to furnace and factory: and there are other observers who find amongst the labouring populations, especially amongst those who are compelled to face danger and to cultivate endurance, an excellence denied to classes sometimes deemed more fortunate. We may pass from the blackness and almost uncouth violence of Middlesborough to the jolly fishermen of the South Coast: to find not the iron trade, but the ocean harvest, “translated into terms of human beings.” Mr. Reynolds, who has lived amongst such a fishermen’s colony in a Devonshire watering-place, can give encouraging testimony to the happiness found there, the generosity, the standards of the poor; to a definite and remote civilisation, which gazes out upon the activities of the wealthier classes above it, sometimes with wonder, sometimes with a little envy, certainly with no hatred or predatory aim.