o sway them,
unconsciously moulding the still growing features into fineness, those
ideas do not come their way. The boys of eight begin to look, at times,
like little men; and the girls of eleven and upwards begin to show signs
of acquaintance with struggling domestic economies; but neither boys nor
girls discover, in the world into which they are growing up, any truly
helpful ideas of what it is comely to be and to think. Lingering peasant
notions of personal fitness and of integrity keep them from going
viciously wrong, so that when they come to puberty their perplexed
spirits are not quite without guidance; yet, after all, the peasant
conditions are gone, and seeing that the new wage-earning conditions do
not, of themselves, suggest worthy ideas of personal bearing, the
children's faculties for that sort of thing soon cease to unfold, and
with a gradual slackening of development the attractiveness disappears.
The want is the more to be regretted in that, at a later time of life,
when the women have been moulded by motherhood and the men by all the
stress and responsibility of their position, such composure and strength
often appear in them as to justify a suspicion that these uncared-for
people are by nature amongst the very best of the English.

V

THE FORWARD MOVEMENT

XXI

THE FORWARD MOVEMENT

The last twenty years having witnessed so much change in the village, it
is interesting to speculate as to the farther changes that may be looked
for in the years to come; indeed, it is more than merely interesting.
Educational enthusiasts are busy; legislators have their eye on
villages; throughout the leisured classes it is habitual to look upon
"the poor" as a sort of raw material, to be remodelled according to
leisured ideas of what is virtuous, or refined, or useful, or nice; and
nobody seems to reflect that the poor may be steadily, albeit
unconsciously, moving along a course of their own, in which they might
be helped a little, or hindered a little, by outsiders, but from which
they will not in the long run be turned aside. Yet such a movement, if
it is really proceeding, will obviously stultify the most
well-intentioned schemes that are not in accordance with it.

And, if I am not greatly mistaken, it is under way. That seems to me an
ill-grounded complacency which permits easy-going people to say lightly,
"Of course we want a few reforms," as if, once those reforms were
brought to pass, the l