es of grass land, there is distress more
acute than ever was known in a Dorset village. But in Northumberland, by
exception, there is a decent country life. 'What I saw of the northern
peasantry impressed me very strongly in their favour; they are very
intelligent, sober, and courteous in their manners.... The education in
Northumberland is very good; the people are intelligent and cute, alive
to the advantages of knowledge, and eager to acquire it; it is a rare
thing to find a grown-up labourer who cannot read and write and who is
not capable of keeping his own accounts.'[30] The same sort of thing was
said of Northumberland in 1869: 'If all England had been like
Northumberland, this commission ought never to have been issued.' The
Commissioner found that though the labourers worked harder and longer
than in the South they were not working against starvation. They were
enjoying a rough plenty, which included fresh milk. The rest of the
family earned sufficient to leave the married woman in her home and no
children under twelve were employed in field labour.[31]

Here then in Northumberland there is a decent country life, but
elsewhere there is an atmosphere of deadness; and it is this deadness of
the countryside which explains the horror that new comers to industrial
regions frequently expressed at the prospect of a forcible return to the
parish of their origin.

'I was told,' says a visitor to Lancashire in 1842, 'that there had been
several instances of death by sheer starvation. On asking why
application had not been made to the commissioner of the parish for
relief, I was informed that they were persons from agricultural
districts who, having committed an act of vagrancy, would be sent to
their parishes, and that they had rather endure anything in the hope of
some manufacturing revival, than return to the condition of farm
labourers from which they had emerged. This was a fact perfectly new to
me, and at the first blush, truly incredible, but I asked the neighbours
in two of the instances quoted ... and they not only confirmed the
story, but seemed to consider any appearance of scepticism a mark of
prejudice or ignorance.'[32]

3. Though there is little peasant life in England, there is life of a
feverish desperate order for many who live in country places. These
people are not farm workers nor yet are they craftsmen who supply the
industrial needs of the village. They are feeders to the towns, engaged
in what