to have a house and a good meal at the end of it all
than merely a good appetite for a meal that he has yet to pay for. I
do not object to buy health in hard physical exercise if I can buy it
in no other way; but I am better satisfied if I can buy health and a
meal at the same time and for the same price. This is practically what
is done every day by men who live in the country. In a town they would
undertake an equal amount of muscular exertion for the sake of health,
and would find that they still had 'to go to business' to live; here
they have done their business in doing their pleasure.

Earth-hunger is without doubt the most wholesome passion men can
entertain, and if Governments were wise they would do all they could to
fortify and gratify it. On the contrary, the settled policy of English
Government is entirely hostile to it. There is no country where it is
so difficult to acquire freehold land in small quantities--a subject on
which I shall have more to say presently. Bad land-laws lie at the
back of what we call the urban tendencies of modern life. If fifty
years ago the Irish peasantry had had the same facilities for acquiring
land that they have to-day, it is safe to say that there would have
been little or no emigration, for never was there race that left the
land of its fathers with such bitter and entire reluctance as the
Irish. The English peasant shares the same reluctance, though his
slower nature is incapable of expressing it with the same volubility of
anguish. Give him enough land to live upon; make him a proprietor
instead of a serf; let him have fair railway rates, so that his produce
can fetch its proper price in the markets, and there were no man so
proud and so content as he. But this is just what the feudal laws of
England will not do for him; and so millions of acres fall out of
cultivation and farms go a-begging because the men who could have kept
them prosperous have been forced to sell their thews and muscles to be
prostituted in the dismal drudgeries of cities.

There is an even worse result. Earth-hunger has been displaced by
Money-hunger. Simple ideas of life must needs perish where the nature
of a nation's life makes them difficult or impossible of attainment. A
country-born youth might keep to the soil, if he saw the slightest hope
that the soil would keep him; when he sees that this is impossible he
files to cities, because he believes that there is more gold to be
picke