Hungary, Prussia, and in the Balkan lands. This is what we find before industrial development comes in. There is no need to dwell on the squalor, on the diseases, on the recurring famines, on the contempt of the proud. It transpires that the peasants to whom the land has now come by revolution, are described as so covetous, narrow and selfish--their trade their politics--that Socialists and idealists are baffled by them. They will starve a city like Buda-Pesth or Petrograd, when their supplies are abundant. They do not seem capable at present of a national or international consciousness, nor of any true democracy larger than the village. In England, too, the rustic life which the Industrial Revolution overthrew, was, in the landlord counties, servile and suffering. The wages and the politics of the South of England until recent times are survivals of the system.[117] We are bound to conclude that to this system we ought not to recur. With all their faults and disadvantages the people of the industrial districts are the most educated, the most independent, the most virile. Numerous economic writers have destroyed, like a sentimental mirage, our view of the old English village, with its homely comfort and peaceful independence. We think more now of its toils, its diseases, its infant mortality, its lost Commons. It was natural for Ruskin, with his love of white thatched cottages and leafy lanes bordered by neglected wasteful hedges full of wild flowers--with his wealthy upbringing, and ignorance of the value of money and of the direness of most people’s need of it, it was natural and inevitable that he should loathe the dreadful new mining villages--rows of cheap insanitary brick houses--and the belching smoke of the colliery chimney. He preferred Coniston to Barrow. But there is no practical guidance in that revolt, except indeed the revolt itself; and that was a message to his time, and is still a message to ours.