pride of our people resents coercion; all the world over the lesson is being taught that organised voluntary effort can succeed where State intervention may simply retard.

We want freedom, elasticity, and practical common sense in all our efforts to reform. The visionary reformer is apt to make a fetish of uniformity and completeness, and to forget that conditions of life, conditions of employment, and the calls for help, assume as many and as varied forms among the classes for which he tries to legislate as in that to which he happens to belong.

We want a wise discrimination as to the limits of intervention and a recognition of the fact that there are spheres in which the State must fail though private initiative may succeed. The more intimate the duties to be taken over, the more searching and personal must the official inquiries be, till State intervention may come to mean that reticence and decent pride must give way to brazen demands for public assistance.

We want above all more careful study of the influences set. up and of the lessons which experience has taught. These things must be weighed and studied deeply and the experience of other States compared with our own. Eagerness to produce an immediate and material improvement, or to gain popularity, must not blind the reformer to the hidden dangers, moral and material, which his proposals involve.

Social reform is a task for statesmen, not for party politicians. It must cease to be a pawn in the game of catching votes. Its lines should not be fashioned in the heat of Parliamentary debate, or robbed of proper consideration by the exigencies of parliamentary procedure. Like all complex and difficult matters, it needs the calmer and the wiser work of expert commissions. Unless the common sense of the people will demand the observance of these conditions, it is useless to hope for social improvement out of 'social reform' legislation.

Above all, we have to be careful not to ignore the traditions of our race. England has been wont to boast of keeping State regulation within narrow limits, and it has been no empty boast. Like a wise parent she has trusted her full-grown children and they have justified her trust. The widest possible sphere has been given to energy and individual initiative, and an extraordinary power of invention and spirit of enterprise have been

shown by the race. Love of fair play and straightforwardness, respect for justice and truth, and reasonable consideration and care for the rights of others, have become national characteristics; for, though individuals may be swayed by selfish instincts, honest appeals to the higher moral sense or to the patriotism of this people have seldom if ever failed. The spirit of independence and of self-reliance which abhors the taint of pauperism or even of charity and impels men and women to struggle through times of difficulty, the kindness of the poor to each other and their extraordinary readiness to help their friends and neighbours, are not the least of our national treasures: they are moral blossoms not to be ruthlessly cut down. They have given us a sound public opinion permeating the great body of that self-respecting and industrious community which constitutes the English nation.

It is just because there is so much that may be marred in the effort to improve, and because such splendid material is at stake, that every experiment affecting the nation must be put to this test-How will this influence our national character? To lower the standard of public opinion is to strike at the life of the nation. If (to take our chief example) men find that in the opinion of their fellows successful fraud upon a common purse is no longer a thing to be despised as of old, but a thing to laugh at and applaud, as it is in Germany, and as our accident compensation and insurance laws are making it here; if pride in dependence takes the place of pride in independence; and if a popular opinion is engendered that the State is merely discharging a debt in attending to the needs of the population, it is not too much to say that a national calamity will have befallen us.

AGRICULTURAL LABOUR AND RURAL HOUSING

1. Common Land and Enclosure. By E. C. K. GONNER. Macmillan and Co.

1912.

2. The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. By R. TAWNEY. Longmans, Green and Co. 1912.

3. English Farming, Past and Present. By ROWLAND E. PROTHERO. Longmans, Green and Co. 1912.

4. The Village Labourer, 1760-1832: a Study in the Government of England before the Reform Bill. By J. L. HAMMOND and BARBARA HAMMOND. Longmans, Green and Co. 1911.

5. Report of an Enquiry by the Board of Trade into the Earnings and Hours of Labour of Workpeople of the United Kingdom. V.-Agriculture in 1907. Cd. 5460. Wyman and Sons. 1910. 6. The Disappearance of the Small Landowner. By A. H. JOHNSON. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1909.

7. The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields. By GILBERT SLATER. Constable and Co. 1907.

OR various reasons, economic, social and political, the

FRver our agricultural population is again beginning

to attract attention. Economically, after thirty years of acute depression, agricultural industry is slowly emerging into a more healthy condition. Side by side with an improvement in the price of the staple products of the large farm, a growing demand for vegetables and fruit has created a new system of intensive cultivation. Hence the tendency to consolidate the land into large areas of permanent grass has been reversed. Some poor grass land has been again put under the plough, the number of very large farms is diminishing, and, in certain favourable districts, small holdings have developed without legislative pressure, merely by the play of economic forces.

Socially, the change is marked by an increase in the number of efficient tenant farmers, some of whom are alive to the bearing of scientific knowledge on agriculture; by the growth, in specific areas, of the prosperous small holder; and by an arrest in the long-continued process of rural depopulation. Partly in consequence of this arrest, the problem of housing the agricultural labourer is becoming urgent. Over a large part of England men cannot obtain cottages. New families

cannot start for want of a roof. Labourers cannot move to districts where work is plentiful. Overcrowding is rampant to an extent which makes health, decency, and comfort difficult or impossible. Meanwhile, the forgotten story of the effects on agriculture of the industrial revolution of a century ago is being written, and throws a flood of light on the present position of the rural population. Stripped of the exaggeration indulged in by some polemical writers, the history of the great change, represented in the Midlands by the process called 'enclosure,' shows clearly that a very real social injury was inflicted on the nation by the rapid consummation of the agelong process by which the medieval peasant, with a definite hold on the soil, was converted into the modern landless labourer.

Politically, underlying the dominant desire of all parties to secure votes, many forces are now at work. On every side there is a genuine desire to improve the lot of the agricultural labourer. The Labour Party, representing the organised workmen of the towns, wish to stop the perennial flow of labour from the country districts, a flow which prevents trade unions from establishing that monopoly at which organised labour no less than organised capital aims. The Liberals, with insufficient attention to local conditions, have attempted to plant small holders as irremovable tenants of County Councils all over the country. They desire the liberation of the labourer from the extreme pressure of present economic forces, and declare their intention to emancipate him from what—with a ludicrous ignorance of the meaning of the word -some of them are pleased to call the relics of feudalism.' Their actual proposal for mending his situation is the application of such typical feudal conceptions as a legal standard wage and Land Courts to determine fair rents. The Unionists see that greater stability would be gained by increasing the number of freeholders; and aim at developing the small owner regardless of his own desires and of economic conditions. Meanwhile, they wish to meet the urgent housing needs by an heroic application of State aid, and propose out of national funds to build cottages to be let at charity rents.

That all is not well with rural England most competent observers agree. Wages are probably too low for the work done, and for the wants of a decent life and home. Over large

areas there is a real need of new cottages with a higher standard of comfort. Except in a few districts, the labourer is divorced from the land and has no holding, sometimes not even a garden, of his own. Throughout almost the whole of the Midlands and the south, the gulf between the capitalist farmer and the labourer is practically impassable, and a good labourer has no chance to rise. But it is as foolish to exaggerate the evil as to ignore it. Probably all is never well or can be well with any human society. At all times some parts of every living organism are out of harmony with the rest or with its environment, and need either greater freedom to adjust themselves, or definite guidance into better ways. Evolution is always at work. A stationary state of society has never existed in the past and, it is safe to say, will never exist in the future. We must look for an endless process of change and development. Nevertheless, a consideration of the best direction for our next steps is no less important because we have ceased to believe that they will attain a final goal.

But, in dealing with any problem which involves the social organism, it is not enough to examine the question superficially from the present aspect alone. To understand the existing state of rural society, and to attack the concurrent problem of rural housing, some knowledge of historical development must be assured; and, since politicians are beginning once more to talk about 'remnants of feudalism,' it may be well to begin our survey with an attempt to set forth the historical commonplace of a picture of some aspects of feudalism as it really existed in England.

Like all other social states, the feudal system of the medieval manor was constantly undergoing change and flux. It is impossible to stereotype its structure, and to say that this or that description is a true account of 'the' manor at such and such a date. Nevertheless, a sketch of its essential features is not beyond achievement, and the work of Maitland, Seebohm, Vinogradoff, Slater, the Webbs, Tawney, Gonner, Prothero, and other recent investigators, gives us a clearer idea of its rise, progress, and decay than was obtainable even a few years ago.

Leaving on one side the controversial question of the origin of the manor-whether it arose from a system of greater or less freedom than itself-we are on surer ground when we trace the changes during its period of active existence. And here