VILLAGE GENTRY.
rfIHREE writers in the Nineteenth Century have lately 1 been debating whether there be any longer such thi ags as village gentry. Colonel Pedder, in the January number, maintains that they are passing out of existence. There was a time when each English village was a little Arcadia, shut out from the world, and even from its nearest neighbours, by difficulties of communication, and governed by its resident and beneficent squire. Now communication is easy, and the squire has taken advantage of the change. For centuries the village gentry did not know that they were dull, and their ignorance was bliss to themselves and to all around them. Now they have eaten of the fatal tree, and they feel that they must have excite- ment or die. They find it, strange to say, in South Kensington. Their woods and fields are forgotten or despised, and they find a bliss once undreamed of has been revealed to them in the ever-lengthening vistas of Cromwell Road. On those spacious pavements they daily meet their fellows, and exchange the rapturous thoughts that only the dweller in Western London can hope to con- ceive. Every year that passes sees the attraction grow stronger, and the villages emptied of some more of the few gentry that still linger within their precincts. Nor is there, according to Colonel Pedder, any counter- movement in progress. When the dwellers in cities "realise a small competence," do they "return to spend it in the country " ? Not they. "Where are the retired officers who were once a familiar figure in our villages ? Watering-places have swallowed them up." Where are our "well-pensioned Indian officials " ? They drift together in South Kensington or Cheltenham. Everywhere the idea of duty is becoming extinct, and its place is taken by the idea of pleasure. But in this gre- garious age pleasure can only be enjoyed in society, and the third heaven of village so3iety is the Cromwell Road.
In the March number of the Nineteenth Century two con- tibutors, Mr. Waters and Colonel Harcourt, essay to answer Colonel Pedder. There is only one way in which the position he has taken can be attacked to any purpose. If his picture is a true one, the conclusion he founds on it is indisputable. If England is to be composed in the near future of a few pleasure cities in which all who care for amusement, or culture, or politics congregate, and a surrounding region of villages abandoned by all save an impoverished farmer or a discontented agricultural labourer, the prospect is indeed saddening. It is one of the chief evils of -life in great cities that the classes which inhabit them are locally distinct. The working city and the residential city lie far apart, and except as the result of some special effort, have no intercourse with one another. If Colonel Pedder's reading of the situation is accurate, the same evil is spreading over the whole country. The houses of the gentry stand empty, or are inhabited by their tenants or their labourers. The old friendly intercourse of class with class is at an end because one of them lives in London, or at a watering-place, or at some foreign health resort, while the other stays on in the villages. But is this picture a true one ? Mr. Waters and Colonel Harcourt both deny that it is. They speak of districts which they know, and of districts widely separated from one another, but nowhere do they find the state of things which Colonel Pedder describes. Of course there are examples of absentee squires and of deserted villages, though even in these it is doubtful whether Colonel Pedder attributes the evil to the right causes. The agri- cultural depression has impoverished landlords as well as farmers, and an impoverished landlord not unnaturally prefers to economise elsewhere than at home. "The members of this class whom I have met," says Mr. Waters, "have never impressed me as being voluntarily absent from their villages and their round of duty.' They live away from home because they have no longer the money they want to live at home, or because they cannot afford to send their children to expensive schools, and so have to live where a good education is to be had at a day school.
To all this, however, Colonel Pedder might rejoin thaf; the fact thatihe is wrong about the cause does not prove, that he is wiong about the effect. Though the needs of economy and education may be an ample excuse fo r absenteeism, all the same it remains absenteeism. Bulb according to Mr. Waters and Colonel Harcourt, Colon( Pedder overlooks a counter-process which serves as 'a natural corrective to the consequences of absenteeisr fr. Doubtless there are many squires whose places know them no more. Old families die out, old properties become ices valualtde, and the village gentry 'are no more proof against the influences of chance and change than any other section of the community. But where Colonel Pedder seems to have lbeen strangely unfortunate in his inquiries is that he has only come across the exodus into the towns. .The compensating exodus into the country seems to have altogether escaped him. Mr. Waters speaks of a district in East Anglia in which in 1875 out of eighteen houses eleve,a were inhabited by their owners, two were let to permanent tenants, four to shooting tenants, and one stood: empty. Now of those eighteen houses ten are inhabited by their owners, five are let to permanent tenarsts, and three to shooting tenants. So far, there- fore, as there has been any change in a quarter of a century, it is for the better. The loss of one owner is made up by the addition of three permanent tenants, and the abolition of one merely shooting tenancy. In another part of England, Mr. Waters tells us that out of thirty-two houses twenty-seven are inhabited by their owners, and that if any old houses became vacant or any new houses were built—with a fair amount of land attaoired—they would be let at once. What stands in the way of any multiplication of the village gentry is the dis- like of the landowners to the advent of new residents.
Colonel Harcourt claims to be acquainted to some extent with ten counties, and as regards five of them "the really extraordinary thing is the number of small gentry that reside in the country." Indeed, evidence upon this point is hardly needed. We can all supply it from our own knowledge. If any one will review his acquaintance among the professional 'classes, he will be surprised at the nal aber who have built or bought houses in the country, or tire only waiting for this or that to happen in order to do so. No doubt in many cases the country house is only livod in for part of the year, and the family return to London for the winter. But ask them which of the two houses they regard as their home, and in tho great majority of cases you will find that it is the country house that has most of their interest and all they can spare of their time. Again, if you go into almost any village within fifty miles of London and ask what is the most flourishing industry, it is ten to one that you will be told that it is the building going on in the neighbourhood that makes employment easy to come by. We know of one village not quite forty miles from London in which not a house had been built for thirty years until about four years ago. Since that time half-a- -dozen have sprung up. It is true the connection of this new type of village gentry with the land is less intimate than -drat of the older type. They are seldom landlords, except on a very small scale; consequently they have not the same relations with the farmers of the district. But they .are employers of labour, they take in some cases an active part in local matters, they are churchwardens or Guardians of the Poor, or they sit on the Parish or District Council. The village of to-day has changed, no doubt, from the village of a century since, but the changes have not been all bad. The new gentry have brought with them new ideas and new projects, and there is no reason to think that the many labourers to whom they collectively give -employment are any worse off than they were in the past .on which Colonel Pedder's thoughts linger so fondly.
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