Art. 6. THE DECAY OF ENGLISH COUNTRY LIFE.

THOSE Who study the advertisements of auctioneers and estate agents must feel many pangs of regret on seeing week after week the lists of historic houses and estates which come under the hammer.

In some cases, such as Hamilton Palace, Temple Newsam, Trentham, Charlton, Bramall, Worsley, and Wingerworth, the rapid encroachment of towns and suburbs have rendered the houses untenable as private residences and the same fate may overtake Wollaton amongst others. In other cases stately homes, such as Stowe, Canford, Battle, Normanhurst, Ravensworth, Overstone, and the Grange, have been turned to other and useful purposes. Moor Park and Hillingdon have been converted into county clubs; while others, such as Beaudesert and Brancepeth, have been dismantled and remain derelict. In the larger number of cases this dispersal is due to the vindictive legislation of the Liberal Party between 1906 and 1914 and to the war taxation of later years.

Agriculture, and the workers on the land, have always played the part of Cinderella amongst Liberal and Labour politicians. Their votes are not numerous enough or sufficiently well organized to make a strong appeal; it is doubtful if any one of the Labour members in Parliament could pass a rudimentary examination in farming. Cheap food is an admirable election cry, and if it involves the ruin of our oldest and greatest industry, then

'Farm hands must starve that city hands may dine.'

Mr Lloyd George, whose knowledge of country life and country industries is very limited, introduced his famous People's Budget in 1909 with the express purpose of destroying the landlords.

'What is the landlord? The landlord is a gentleman who does not earn his wealth. His sole function, his chief pride, is the stately consumption of wealth produced by others.'

'We will give the great landlords a turn on the wheel, and put them on the treadmill for a short time, and see how they like it.'

Such were the intentions of the People's Budget,

ushered in with the promise of the millennium which was to end in dire failure.

We readily acknowledge the great services rendered to the country in the War by Mr Lloyd George, when his unquestioned abilities were applied to problems which he understood, or soon learned to understand; but we cannot forget that, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he neither knew, nor perhaps cared to inquire, what injury he would ultimately inflict on that very large and important body of his fellow-subjects who gain their living from the land. Their interests have been but weakly supported in political circles whenever they were in conflict with the interests of the towns.

The damnosa heræditas of Liberal Government was dealt with in the article 'The Legacy of Liberalism,' which appeared in this Review last October, and we need not now dwell on it at length; but we will endeavour to recall some of the services rendered to the country by the landowners and land-working classes, and some of the secondary causes which have contributed to their present deplorable state.

The very meaning of the phrase 'country life,' as we have come to understand it, is significant of our town way of looking at things. It has come to have a social rather than a geographical meaning. For none would choose the ploughman as entirely typical of country life. He leads rather an existence of nature and of toil; the country to him is little more than the place where there is earth to be turned and wages to be gotten; whereas the country life presupposes health, wealth, and leisure on the part of him who enjoys it.

It is the gradual obscuring of the fact of country life being a privilege that constitutes the decadence, of which thoughtful observers cannot help being conscious. The life itself is in some respects as flourishing as ever, and the personnel as vigorous and cultured; but for nearly a century political changes have been working against the landowners and preventing their discharging their duties to the full. These duties, apart from the management of their estates, comprised also, until the Reform Bill of 1832, the government of the nation. A candidate for any State appointment, even to a seat in Parliament,

was required to possess land. A knight of the shire needed to have 600l. worth of landed property a year; borough members, 300l.; a Justice of the Peace, other than the heir to a peerage or an estate, 100l.; deputy lieutenants, 2007.; colonels of militia, 10007.; lieutenantcolonels, 600l.; and the franchise was given by land tenure, though by the end of the 18th century such tenure was frequently only nominal. In common with the other laws of the kingdom, this limitation of privilege dated from the remote past, and when the landowners of the late 17th century set up the principle of a limited monarchy and vested the executive power in themselves, the criterion necessary to admit a man to the aristocracy —that is, to the governing class-was naturally taken as being the possession of land. Thus from 1688 to 1832 the country gentleman governed the State; he had the prestige as well as the power, and so the process began through which the surface of the country was apportioned out; for if successful men wished to progress further, they were compelled to buy land; and so country life came to mean the life of the established and affluent.

Whatever the pursuits of the English squire from the 17th to the middle of the 19th century may have been, he had no lack of self-confidence. Remote from London and the Court, his estate was generally self-supporting and self-contained. With the 18th century that characteristic of self-sufficiency was modified, but throughout that period much of the food, clothes, household goods and furniture, the architecture, as well as the dialect, were local and characteristic. The amusements too, the dances, songs, and games, while varying from district to district, generally flourished throughout the rural area. In much the same way, the great house, as often it was called, was self-sufficient. The products of the park, farm, and garden, still-room and brewhouse, bakery and curing chimney, furnished the family and the servants with many luxuries and with all the necessities.

Over pretty well every one of these small states a squire reigned, and it was natural, as well as desirable, that he should be a little Leviathan, an embodiment of what he ruled. He was the local father; he felt a proprietary interest in the welfare of every one of his dependants, as he did in the prosperity of his land. He

felt responsible for the care of his folk; his mind and his time were in great measure devoted to their welfare and to the administration of justice, his judgments being rather those of a father than of a magistrate. As often as not his decisions were given in his own garden, for 'he compounded many petty differences betwixt his neighbours which were easier ended in his own porch than in Westminster Hall.' That his rents might be equitable he superintended, with his steward, the farming of his tenants, and not infrequently, in the later days of agricultural reform, he was the local initiator of improved methods; while on his return from Westminster he brought home with him new ideas in art, literature, and husbandry. The libraries of old country houses are testimony to the wide, practical, and humane learning of those men. I cannot comprehend,' said Darcy in 'Pride and Prejudice,'' the neglect of a family library in such days as these.' The squire's family shared to the full this quiet life; and in the surroundings of their home in the country, with its exercises, sport, and pastimes, his sons were prepared for the responsibilities to come, as soldiers and sailors, parsons, judges, and ambassadors; so to display on the vast stage of public activity the qualities and talents slowly acquired in the well-used leisure of their country life. It was the land, and the life in the open, which counted. The towns might speed learning, provide the more showy and expensive forms of pleasure, and afford opportunities for winning place or acquiring wealth; but still it was the man of landed property who led.

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To-day we must confess that, beyond conferring a slight traditional prestige, and, among the indigent, an expectation of entertainment, the possession of land is of little consequence to our social organisation. Wealth, and wealth alone, seems to be the ultimate standard of the dominant element in society. As the yeomanry were sacrificed to the artisan, so has the squire been surrendered to the business man, as Lord Ernle has remarked in an unconscious Alexandrine.

The centre of gravity has shifted to the towns. The equipment, mental and utilitarian, of the country-man now is town-made. The squire is no longer the embodiment of his estate. The peasantry largely subsist on the

products of the towns, and to an increasing extent the great country-houses find it satisfactory to deal with the London stores. Moreover, the countryside is coming to contain a growing multitude of persons who spend their nights there, but whose labour, serious interests, and earnings are given to the towns. Nor is this type confined to the daily breader,' for many great houses harbour such déracinés upon a more generous scale. To millions of people the country means nothing but a large garden for the recreating of their bodies and minds. What do they know of the toil, the glory of possession, or of the mysteries, of the land? Countrymen at heart as they may be, they recognise their own need of the country, but neglect its life. The towns, having drained the country of its population, now are sucking its vitalising spirit, leaving but the dead shell, littering the fields with city refuse, which often they are too exhausted to assimilate.

The squire, who if he is wise now depends only in part upon his property for his income and subsistence, as a rule is no longer as closely interested in his estate as his forefathers were. There are exceptions to this generalisation, of course; but the tendency of the past hundred years warrants the assertion. Some landowners, indeed, have reformed their landed property, and adapted it to the requirements of the new time. Hundreds have made dairy-farming profitable. Such bodies as the Country Gentleman's Association and the Central Landowner's Association have succeeded in stimulating and supplying a sound policy for landowners. But in the vast majority of cases the verdict of Sir A. D. Hall, expressed before the War at the conclusion of his 'Pilgrimage of British Farming,' is still accurate enough to quote:

'We must conclude that landowners, however helpful and kindly to their tenants, are yet deficient in leadership. There is no one nowadays to set beside Coke of Norfolk, or the landowners who did pioneer work in the second quarter of the 18th century; almost the only working part they take in agriculture consists in the breeding of pedigree stock, and that rather as a form of social competition than for the improvement of farming. The great opportunities they might exercise, in the way of drawing their tenants into co-operative marketing and purchase, or improved methods of farm