All such observations, however, are faced with some fundamental difficulties. One of these is the difficulty of ascertaining where the essential nation resides: what spirit and temper, in what particular class or locality, will stand to the future for twentieth-century England. A few generations ago that difficulty did not exist. England was the population of the English countryside: the “rich man in his castle,” the “poor man at his gate”; the feudal society of country house, country village, and little country town, in a land whose immense wealth still slept undisturbed. But no one to-day would seek in the ruined villages and dwindling population of the countryside the spirit of an “England” four-fifths of whose people have now crowded into the cities. The little red-roofed towns and hamlets, the labourer in the fields at noontide or evening, the old English service in the old English village church, now stand but as the historical survival of a once great and splendid past. Is “England” then to be discovered in the feverish industrial energy of the manufacturing cities? In the vast welter and chaos of the capital of Empire? Amongst the new Plutocracy? The middle classes? The artisan populations? The broken poor? All contribute their quota to the stream of the national life. All have replies to give the interrogator of their customs and beliefs and varying ideals. All together make up a picture of a “roaring reach of death and life” in a world where the one single system of a traditional hierarchy has fissured into a thousand diversified channels, with eddies and breakwaters, whirlpools and sullen marshes, and every variety of vigour, somnolence, and decay.