abouring population would thereafter settle down
and change no more. In one respect, no doubt, there is little more to be
looked for. The changes so far observed have been thrust upon the people
from outside--changes in their material or social environment, followed
by mere negations on their part, in the abandonment of traditional
outlooks and ambitions; and of course in that negative direction the
movement must come to an end at last. But when there are no more old
habits to be given up, there is still plenty of scope for acquiring new
ones, and this is the possibility that has to be considered. What if,
quietly and out of sight--so quietly and inconspicuously as to be
unnoticed even by the people themselves--their English nature,
dissatisfied with negations, should have instinctively set to work in a
positive direction to discover a new outlook and new ambitions? What if
the merely mechanical change should have become transmuted into a vital
growth in the people's spirit--a growth which, having life in it, must
needs go on spontaneously by a process of self-unfolding? If that should
be the case, as I am persuaded that it is, then the era of change in the
village is by no means over; on the contrary, it is more likely that the
greatest changes are yet to come.

As the signs which should herald their approach will be those of
recovery from the mental and spiritual stagnation into which the village
has been plunged, and as we may regard that stagnation as the
starting-point from which any further advance will proceed, it is worth
while to fix it in our minds by a similitude. What has most obviously
happened to the village population resembles an eviction, when the
inmates of a cottage have been turned out upon the road-side with their
goods and chattels, and there they sit, watching the dismantling of
their home, and aware only of being moved against their will. It is a
genuine movement of them; yet it does not originate with them; and the
first effect of it upon them is stagnation. Unable to go on in their old
way, yet knowing no other way in which to go on, they merely wait
disconsolate.

The similitude really fits the case very well, in this village at least,
and probably in many others. Of the means whereby the people have been
thrust out from the peasant traditions in which they were at home I have
discussed only the chief one--namely, the enclosure of the common. That
was the cause which irresistibly compelled th