ain, I do not think
it is making anything like so much impression on the village life as it
ought to make, and as it is commonly supposed to be making. It is not
quite a failure; but it is by no means a great success. In so far as it
has enabled the people to read their papers (and it has not done that
very well) it has been serviceable; but neither as a cause of change nor
as a guide into happier ways of life has it any claim to especial
mention in these chapters. I am not saying that it is unworthy of
attention: on the contrary, there is no subject relating to the village
that demands so much. If, as I believe, it is one, and the foremost, of
those activities which are largely abortive because they have not got
into touch with the spontaneous movement of the village life, the matter
is of the utmost seriousness. But this is not the place for entering
into it; for I have not set out to criticize the varied experiments in
reform which are being tried upon the labouring people. My book is
finished, now that I have pointed to the inner changes going on in the
village itself.

As to the future of those changes, I will not add to what I have already
said, but there is evidently much room for speculation; and those who
best know the villagers--their brave patience, their sincerity, the
excellent groundwork of their nature--and those who see how full of
promise are the children, generation after generation, until hardship
and neglect spoil them, will be slow to believe what leisured folk are
so fond of saying--namely, that these lowly people owe their lowliness
to defects in their inborn character. It is too unlikely. The race
which, years ago, in sequestered villages, unaided by the outer world
at all, and solely by force of its own accumulated traditions, could
build up that sturdy peasant civilization which has now gone--that race,
I say, is not a race naturally deficient. There is no saying what its
offspring may not achieve, once they get their powers of intellect awake
on modern lines and can draw freely upon the great world for ideas.

At any rate, the hope is great enough to forbid the indulgence of any
deep regret for what has gone by. The old system had gone on long
enough. For generations the villagers had grown up and lived and died
with large tracts of their English vitality neglected, unexplored; and I
do not think the end of that wasteful system can be lamented by anyone
who believes in the English. Rather it