I think that if I had left such questions alone altogether there would be no criticism to meet. I could point to a dozen novelists who write about the same sort of people, living in the same surroundings, as I do, against whom it would not be brought, because they take the conditions for granted, and their readers take them for granted. If I touch upon such questions here and there it is because they interest me as factors in the lives of my characters; but they are not the factors which I have chosen as the main thesis of my novels, except in one instance. In "The Old Order Changeth" I did seek to reflect the renewal that is always going on in English landowning, and always has gone on since the beginning,--where the new men come in to dispossess the old; and the social disturbance that takes place at each such upheaval, before the new become absorbed in their turn into the old. That is how I see it. Whatever changes may have come and may be coming in the economic conditions of landholding, and of agricultural labour, the life of the country house, large or small, goes on much the same as ever, and will go on. Where it can no longer be supported by the land, it is supported by money made elsewhere. English people like the flavour of country life, and it is very seldom that a man who has made his fortune in business does not eventually buy or rent a country house. Many of the big estates in the United Kingdom have been acquired of late years by rich Americans, who buy them, I suppose, not as an investment in property, but because they also are attracted by the flavour of English country life. Country houses, from the great house such as is represented here by Abington Abbey down to the little house such as Stone Cottage, are scattered all over England, and I should say that in nine cases out of ten, taking large and small together, the people who inhabit them have no concern with the land, in the way of drawing any part of their income from it, or of dealing with it as a productive agency. They have not come "back to the land" in any essential sense; they have only come back to the country. I believe that no economic changes that may affect those who live by the land, whether as employers or labourers, will much affect the social life of English country houses.