s point was like the card one produces before
one is admitted to certain functions. No one came to Becket without it;
or, if he did, he begged, borrowed, or stole it the moment he smelled
Clara's special pot-pourri in the hall; and, though he sometimes threw
it out of the railway-carriage window in returning to town, there was
nothing remarkable about that. The conversational debauch of the first
night's dinner--and, alas! there were only two even at Becket during
a week-end--had undoubtedly revealed the feeling, which had set in of
late, that there was nothing really wrong with the condition of the
agricultural laborer, the only trouble being that the unreasonable
fellow did not stay on the land. It was believed that Henry Wiltram,
in conjunction with Colonel Martlett, was on the point of promoting a
policy for imposing penalties on those who attempted to leave it without
good reason, such reason to be left to the discretion of impartial
district boards, composed each of one laborer, one farmer, and one
landowner, decision going by favor of majority. And though opinion was
rather freely expressed that, since the voting would always be two
to one against, this might trench on the liberty of the subject, many
thought that the interests of the country were so much above this
consideration that something of the sort would be found, after all, to
be the best arrangement. The cruder early notions of resettling the land
by fostering peasant proprietorship, with habitable houses and security
of tenure, were already under a cloud, since it was more than suspected
that they would interfere unduly with the game laws and other soundly
vested interests. Mere penalization of those who (or whose fathers
before them) had at great pains planted so much covert, enclosed so much
common, and laid so much country down in grass was hardly a policy for
statesmen. A section of the guests, and that perhaps strongest because
most silent, distinctly favored this new departure of Henry Wiltram's.
Coupled with his swinging corn tax, it was indubitably a stout platform.

A second section of the guests spoke openly in favor of Lord Settleham's
policy of good-will. The whole thing, they thought, must be voluntary,
and they did not see any reason why, if it were left to the kindness and
good intentions of the landowner, there should be any land question
at all. Boards would be formed in every county on which such model
landowners as Sir Gerald Mallorin