There are the railroads, and (though the carriages are not always comfortable, and the trains generally late) they afford such facilities for the gentryfolk to go to town, that we cannot wonder at their doing so. If it is not right that they should, surely railroads would never have been permitted, cutting up the beautiful country as they do, and sending their screaming engines along through the green fields and thriving plough-lands, where all before was peaceful and quiet.
Then if the farmers are changed, it is also all for the best without doubt. Changed they are, beyond all question. They are a different class of men from the old species of farmer who existed fifty years ago, and who seldom went further than his market town.
Our farmers, now-a-days, have all visited London again and again, and instead of the homely talk over a market dinner which used to take place in old days, they have got "Chambers of Agriculture," in which they evince a remarkable ability in discussing anything which Parliament proposes to do about agricultural matters, and talk nearly as wisely, I am told, as the members of the House of Commons itself!
Still, however, I stick to my text, and say that, being as it is, it must be all right.
Of course it is, and so also with regard to the labourers. When I was a boy they did not know half as much as they do now, but they worked well for all that.
I have lodged in two rooms in this farmhouse in which I write for twenty-seven years come next Michaelmas, and I have often heard farmer Barrett say that his best labourers were generally those who could neither read nor write.
Most of them can do both now, and people used to say that it was a sin and a shame that every labourer should not be able to read his Bible and write his name in it.
"All right," again say I, only unfortunately (as I sometimes venture to think) it is not their Bibles they read, so much as the penny papers, and these sometimes teach them different lessons from the Bible, I fancy. Then there is a lot of cheap—well, trash I was going to say, and I think I must, too—a lot of cheap trash which is sent about all over the country, or which they pick up here and there, and which teaches them lessons altogether mischievous.
Moreover, they have societies, which are curious sort of concerns, I am told, and through which they are taught actually to demand an increase of wages, and various other things which were never thought of in old times.
All these things have made the country districts of England very different places from what they used to be when I first knew them. That is now a long time ago, but I know a great deal that happened before I knew anything from my own eyesight and observation—I mean before I was born.