should reconcile us to the
disillusionments of this present time of transition. They are
devastating, I admit; for me, they have spoilt a great deal of that
pleasure which the English country used to give me, when I still fancied
it to be the scene of a joyful and comely art of living. I know now that
the landscape is not peopled by a comfortable folk, whose dear and
intimate love of it gave a human interest to every feature of its
beauty; I know that those who live there have in fact lost touch with
its venerable meanings, while all their existence has turned sordid and
anxious and worried; and knowing this, I feel a forlornness in country
places, as if all their best significance were gone. But,
notwithstanding this, I would not go back. I would not lift a finger,
or say a word, to restore the past time, for fear lest in doing so I
might be retarding a movement which, when I can put these sentiments
aside, looks like the prelude to a renaissance of the English
country-folk.

Note.--In the preceding chapters no reference is made either to the
new Insurance Act or to recent labour unrest. The book was, in
fact, already in the publishers' hands when those matters began to
excite general attention; and it hardly seems necessary now, merely
for the sake of being momentarily up to date, to begin introducing
allusions which after all would leave the main argument unchanged.

_December_, 1911.

THE END

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Change in the Village, by
(AKA George Bourne) George Sturt

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHANGE IN THE VILLAGE ***

***** This file should be named 27518.txt or 27518.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
http://www.gutenberg.org/2/7/5/1/27518/

Produced by Tom Roch, Martin Pettit and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images produced by Core Historical
Literature in Agriculture (CHLA), Cornell University)

Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
set forth in t