Part 20

It may be urged that, along with the Church, the newspaper and politics, education should have been named, as a fourth power affecting the village destinies. A moment's consideration, however, will discover that it does not come into the same category with those three influences, if only for this reason, that it is forced upon the village children from outside, while the older people have no chance to interest themselves in it as they have in the Church teachings or in the daily paper. No spontaneous movement, therefore, such as I have outlined in the other cases, can be traced in regard to education; but I had a stronger reason than that for omitting mention of it. To be quite plain, I do not think it is making anything like so much impression on the village life as it ought to make, and as it is commonly supposed to be making. It is not quite a failure; but it is by no means a great success. In so far as it has enabled the people to read their papers (and it has not done that very well) it has been serviceable; but neither as a cause of change nor as a guide into happier ways of life has it any claim to especial mention in these chapters. I am not saying that it is unworthy of attention: on the contrary, there is no subject relating to the village that demands so much. If, as I believe, it is one, and the foremost, of those activities which are largely abortive because they have not got into touch with the spontaneous movement of the village life, the matter is of the utmost seriousness. But this is not the place for entering into it; for I have not set out to criticize the varied experiments in reform which are being tried upon the labouring people. My book is finished, now that I have pointed to the inner changes going on in the village itself.

As to the future of those changes, I will not add to what I have already said, but there is evidently much room for speculation; and those who best know the villagers--their brave patience, their sincerity, the excellent groundwork of their nature--and those who see how full of promise are the children, generation after generation, until hardship and neglect spoil them, will be slow to believe what leisured folk are so fond of saying--namely, that these lowly people owe their lowliness to defects in their inborn character. It is too unlikely. The race which, years ago, in sequestered villages, unaided by the outer world at all, and solely by force of its own accumulated traditions, could build up that sturdy peasant civilization which has now gone--that race, I say, is not a race naturally deficient. There is no saying what its offspring may not achieve, once they get their powers of intellect awake on modern lines and can draw freely upon the great world for ideas.

At any rate, the hope is great enough to forbid the indulgence of any deep regret for what has gone by. The old system had gone on long enough. For generations the villagers had grown up and lived and died with large tracts of their English vitality neglected, unexplored; and I do not think the end of that wasteful system can be lamented by anyone who believes in the English. Rather it should reconcile us to the disillusionments of this present time of transition. They are devastating, I admit; for me, they have spoilt a great deal of that pleasure which the English country used to give me, when I still fancied it to be the scene of a joyful and comely art of living. I know now that the landscape is not peopled by a comfortable folk, whose dear and intimate love of it gave a human interest to every feature of its beauty; I know that those who live there have in fact lost touch with its venerable meanings, while all their existence has turned sordid and anxious and worried; and knowing this, I feel a forlornness in country places, as if all their best significance were gone. But, notwithstanding this, I would not go back. I would not lift a finger, or say a word, to restore the past time, for fear lest in doing so I might be retarding a movement which, when I can put these sentiments aside, looks like the prelude to a renaissance of the English country-folk.

Note.--In the preceding chapters no reference is made either to the new Insurance Act or to recent labour unrest. The book was, in fact, already in the publishers' hands when those matters began to excite general attention; and it hardly seems necessary now, merely for the sake of being momentarily up to date, to begin introducing allusions which after all would leave the main argument unchanged.

_December_, 1911.

THE END

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD