from the mis-statements of the mercenary and the pottering of the politician that a painstaking attempt to set out impartially all that can be said for and against the industry is welcome.

We end as we began. The books before us bear witness to a widespread interest in the question of the land, and to a desire on many sides to consider the question apart from party ties. In the whole of these publications it is not easy to find a party allusion. Exposition of the rural problem is not, indeed, work for party politicians at all. The questions which call for solution in rural England need the attention of the clearest heads in the country districts; and the clearest heads are not all on one side in politics. If people who live in the country and know the country stand together, they can prevail against politicians who have their eyes chiefly upon votes. We rejoice in the success that has attended the Farmers' Union, and trust that it will continue to take a strictly non-party line. So many rural questions are questions of fact, not of opinion.

As recent land sales have shown, instructed students of rural conditions are under no illusions as to the advantages of unlimited landowning. It must puzzle some excited Radicals to find a peer's son remarking, as Mr Strutt does, that, apart from districts where there are moors and forests, it is difficult to see, from the landowner's point of view, what object there is in owning more than 5000 acres.' With regard to education, Lord Haldane stated in January, on the authority of the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Minister of Education, that it was 'the next and the most urgent of the great social problems we have to take up.' If Mr Lloyd George hopes to do much for rural progress without going to the foundations of agricultural education, which are to be found in the schools of the villages and small towns, he is certain to be disappointed. As the last report of the Board of Agriculture shows, our system of agricultural education has made a great advance during the last few years, but it would have been a still more valuable national asset had it not been so largely constructed from the top downwards instead of from the bottom up.

As to wages, everybody agrees that wages should be

higher in many districts, especially in view of the rise in prices which has made the labourer's earnings go a much shorter way at the village shop, where at all times he is at a disadvantage through buying inferior goods in small quantities. If Mr Rowntree is anything like right in his well-known computations, an average labouring family needs for full physical efficiency somewhere about 188. 6d. weekly, excluding rent. As from the Midlands to the Channel, the Severn and the North Sea, the average total weekly earnings of the agricultural labourer are below that sum, we have to assume, on the supposition that Mr Rowntree's calculations are accurate, that something less than full physical efficiency exists, or that there is a larger income than appears because the man's earnings are added to by his wife and perhaps his children. If this is so, less is being paid for the labourer's services than ought to be paid. But the movement for higher wages will not be helped by under-estimating the total effective income of the labourer, as is too often done by town writers. It is not for nothing that the medical officer of health of one county has lately deplored the gradual cessation of payments to labourers in kind. The figures of the Government return, ranging from 188. 4d. in the north and west midlands to 17s. 6d. in the south, include, however, payments in kind as well as money. Still, the labourer has gained something in a pecuniary sense from free education, old-age pensions, and national insurance. As to his food, it may be plain, but no instructed person doubts that the bread and bacon or cheese and an onion. munched slowly in the open air, constitute, from a nutritive point of view, as serviceable a diet as the more elaborate and more expensive fare which urban mechanies take with them to their work or sit down to eat in a steamy meat-and-pudding refreshment-house.

It is easy to propose the establishment of a minimum wage; the difficult thing is to contrive that such an expedient shall be to the real advantage of agricultural workers as a class. The operations of farming furnish work for men of different ages and abilities. It is possible that 20 per cent. of the men at present earning less than 11. a week-the old men and the less able men-might be put out of regular work were a legal minimum wage established. If this were to happen.

we should have to expect such another social calamity in the rural districts as is recorded in The Village Labourer' and English Farming'-a large increase in the number of casual labourers. There can be no doubt, however, that, because of the present low-wage system, many farmers have got into the way of looking only for a certain amount of work from their men, and that, in the interests of the men and of farming efficiency, it is most desirable that a more businesslike system should be introduced. Farm labour should be better organised, and so earn more for both men and masters. A determined attempt should be made to raise wages as high as possible if only in order to compete with the wages and other attractions offered by the towns; not to speak of the glowing baits of the voluble emigration agent. But an economically sound and permanent rise in wages is not to be secured by legislation alone, and we do not find it easy to believe that the Government, when it comes face to face with practical considerations, at present unknown to its urban supporters, who manifest a desire to solve rural problems outright by Acts of Parliament, will commit itself to any particularly wild course of action. The way in which it was compelled to pick up information as it went along in the case of the Insurance Act is too recent a lesson.

Thus, in discussing the question of a minimum wage for farm hands, we are brought back to the question of rural education; for small good will result from a rise in wages if instruction is not given as to how to spend it to the best advantage. In the same connexion it is also impossible altogether to overlook the fact that the question of trades unionism for agricultural labourers may present itself before long. Mr Arch's organisation, though it failed to take root, owing to the difficulty of assembling and collecting the dues from widely scattered workers unaccustomed to correspondence and corporate action, did do something, as a few labourers remember, to raise wages. Now that every labourer has his bicycle and the local train services have improved; now that labourers are better educated, read a paper, and are more familiar with the idea of combination, there is always the possibility that, if capable and trustworthy leaders are forthcoming, agricultural trade-unionism may revive.

The first thoughts of farmers will lead them to be strongly opposed to such a development; though, as their men may remind them, they have a Farmers' Union. The business of a farm, which depends so much on the weather and involves the care of live stock, might receive, it will be contended, a fatal stroke from a sudden stoppage of work. On the other hand, it will be argued, no doubt, that stoppages of work are not a normal but an abnormal feature of trade unionism; that there are advantages as well as disadvantages in dealing with organised labour; and that, for good or evil, the conditions of rural life and industry have changed, and, willy-nilly, employers must recognise the fact. In any case, it should be realised that stolid antagonism to trade unionism will not suffice to prevent its development, if it should present itself to the modern agricultural labourer as a ready and sufficient means of remedying the undoubted grievance, in respect of wages and housing, from which he admittedly suffers in many districts. The only way effectively to combat the movement, which, it is as well to recognise, is already making some progress in the eastern counties, is to be beforehand with the reforms which intelligent labourers may legitimately demand. The men are not voiceless, as they used to be, and there is now a very much larger urban population and a widely circulated popular press to hear and magnify their complaint. The towns have grown accustomed to unionism in every urban trade; and if the labourers should be compelled to organise before those of their number who are poorly paid and ill housed can secure the wages and the dwellings to which skilled and hard-working men are entitled, they may certainly reckon on a considerable measure of popular sympathy. As Mr Disraeli bluntly told the Bucks Agricultural Association, an agricultural labourer has as much right to combine for the bettering of his condition as a manufacturing labourer or a worker in metal.'

* Echoes of Old County Life,' by J. K. Fowler, 1892, p. 75.

Art. 11.- MADAME DU DEFFAND AND HORACE WALPOLE.

Lettres de la Marquise du Deffand à Horace Walpole (1766-1780). Première Édition Complète, Augmentée d'environ 500 Lettres Inédites publiées d'après les Originaux, avec une Introduction, des Notes, et une Table des Noms par Mrs Paget Toynbee. Trois Tomes. Londres: Methuen, 1912.

On

L'AMOUR est comme la dévotion; il vient tard. n'est guère amoureuse ni dévote à vingt ans.' When he wrote those words Anatole France embodied a truth which is never frankly faced by analysts of the human heart, though it is one that is ever confronting the moralist and the director of souls. But even in France, where every way of love is regarded with such indulgent understanding and such charity, the strange, ardent, frustrate passion of Madame du Deffand for Horace Walpole has excited, for over a hundred years, uneasy surprise and curious speculation. And now the history of, perhaps, the most singular amitié amoureuse of which our world will ever have the secret, is revealed in three large volumes, containing eight hundred and thirty-eight letters, six of which only are imperfect. It is, alas, but a one-sided correspondence. Thanks to Walpole's nervous dread of ridicule, a large number of his letters to his 'dear old woman' were burnt by her at his request: others, returned to him in her lifetime, were, after her death, finally destroyed by Miss Berry, to whom he left the full responsibility of dealing with all his papers and correspondence.

·

The publication, in 1809, of a selection of Madame du Deffand's correspondence with d'Alembert, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hénault, and the delight with which it was received, was probably the inspiring cause of Miss Berry's edition. Be that as it may, she published in 1810 four small volumes of Letters of the Marquise du Deffand to the Honble. Horace Walpole.' She thought it her duty to edit severely the three hundred and fortyeight letters chosen from the great mass of material then at her disposal, but, even so, the fragmentary correspondence made a prodigious sensation, especially in