ing to each so much weight as would enable its influence to be
felt, while preserving to the landed gentry their preponderance. That
would have been difficult, no doubt, but it would have been worth
doing; whereas it was, to my mind, as foolish as it was easy simply to
add new batches of electors, till we shall arrive, I do not doubt, at
what, in effect, is universal suffrage, without having ever admitted to
ourselves that we wanted to have it.

"But what has been done is final and irremediable. Henceforth,
numbers, or rather those who control numbers, will dominate England;
and they will not be the men under whom hitherto she has grown great.
For people like myself there is no longer a place in politics. And
really, so far as I am personally concerned, I am rather glad to know
it. Those who have got us into the mess must get us out of it.
Probably they will do so, in their own way; but they will make, in the
process, a very different England from the one I have known and
understood and loved. We shall have a population of city people,
better fed and housed, I hope, than they are now, clever and quick and
smart, living entirely by their heads, ready to turn out in a moment
for use everything they know, but knowing really very little, and not
knowing it very well. There will be fewer of the kind of people in
whom I take pleasure, whom I like to regard as peculiarly English, and
who are the products of the countryside; fellows who grow like
vegetables, and, without knowing how, put on sense as they put on flesh
by an unconscious process of assimilation; who will stand for an hour
at a time watching a horse or a pig, with stolid moon-faces as
motionless as a pond; the sort of men that visitors from town imagine
to be stupid because they take five minutes to answer a question, and
then probably answer by asking another; but who have stored up in them
a wealth of experience far too extensive and complicated for them ever
to have taken account of it. They live by their instincts not their
brains; but their instincts are the slow deposit of long years of
practical dealings with nature. That is the kind of man I like. And I
like to live among them in the way I do--in a traditional relation
which it never occurs to them to resent, any more than it does to me to
abuse it. That sort of relation you can't create; it has to grow, and
to be handed down from father to son. The new men who come on to the
land never manage to