All The Old Things Remain On The Farm, But The Village Is Driven Out - The
Village That Used To Come As One Man To The Reaping.
Machinery has not
altered the earth, but it has altered the conditions of men's lives, and
as work decreases, so men decrease.
Some go the cities, some emigrate;
the young men drift away, and there is none of that home life that there
used to be. They are going to try to re-settle our land by altering the
laws. Most certainly the laws ought to be altered, and must be altered,
still it is evident to any one of dispassionate thought, while such
immense quantities of gold are sent away from us, profit cannot be made
in farming either small or great. The crop is the same in either case,
and if there is no sale for the produce, it matters very little whether
you farm four acres or four hundred.
New hats and jackets, but the same old faces. A stout old farmer sat at
the side of his barn door on the hatch leaning against the post. His body
was as rotund as a full sack of wheat, his great chin and his great
checks were full; a man very solidly set as it were, and he eyed me, a
stranger, as I passed down the lane, with mistrust and suspicion in every
line of his face. Out of the hunting season a stranger might perhaps have
been seen there once in six months, and this was that once. The British
bull-dog growled in his countenance - very likely pleasantness itself to
those he knew, grimness itself to others. The sunlight fell full into the
barn, the great doors wide open; there were sacks on the other side of
the door piled up inside, a heap of grain, and two men turning the
winches of a winnowing machine. New hats, but old faces. Could his
great-great-grandfather have been dug up and set in that barn door, he
would have looked just the same, so would the sacks, and the wheat, and
the sunshine. At the market town, where the auctioneer's hammer goes tap
tap over bullocks and sheep, crowds of men gather together, - farmers, and
bailiffs, and shepherds, drovers and labourers - and their clothes are
different, but there are the same old weather-beaten faces. Faces that
you may see in the ancient illuminated manuscripts, in the realistic wood
engravings of early printed books, in the etchings of last century, the
same lines and expression. The earth has marked them all. In a modern
country sketch or picture you would - not - find them, they would be
smoothed away - drawing-room faces, made transparent, in attitudes like
easy-limbed girls delicately proportioned These are not country people.
Country people are the same now in appearance as when the old artists
honestly drew them; sturdy and square, bulky and slow, no attitudes, no
drawing-room grace, no Christmas card glossiness; somewhat stiff of limb,
with a distinct flavour of hay and straw about them, and no enamel.
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