EXPERIENCES AS AN ENUMERATOR.
rTo THE EDITOR or TUX “SPECTATOR."] SIE,—I had charge of a large parish in Devon, sparsely inhabited, and I came Heroes some expressions of belief as to the cause of the war which amazed me. A farmer's wife, who has brothers at the front, said she bad heard that the Kaiser should by rights be on the British throne, he being the son of Queen Victoria's eldest child, and he was fighting for it! On referring to this at other farms I found it was a common subject for discussion. She also said• she was told that the stories of German cruelties were untrue, and that by rights England ought not to be fighting. This woman lives in a house which has no road to it, and perhaps sees a paper once a week. On pressing her as to where she heard all this, she became apparently alarmed, and said "From a farmer," but nothing would induce her to give me his name. No farmer ever evolved thh " right to the throne" notion out of his own head, and the puzzle is who can have started it. I found everybody most interested and friendly, knowing most of the people personally of course helping one a good deal. The one thing upon which all seemed agreed was that " everybody should have been fetched" at the beginning. Boys living on lonely farms shrank from the awful responsibility of deciding whether they should go and leave the farm or stay and help, and it seemed to me they had some justification. In one house there were four sons out of five fighting ; at another four sons at home.—I am, Sir, &c.,
_Devonshire. R. T. WJLTEIN WILLIAMS.
P.S.—I was asked at one house whether it was true that a large landowner and former M.P. held several thousands of pounds of shares in "Krupp's," and this by a man who could not possibly have ever heard of Krupp's except in this con- nexion.
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