THE DISPARAGEMENT OF ENGLAND.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—I have just been enjoying your article "The Disparage- ment of England" in last week's Spectator. You are quite right in saying that our agricultural labourers are a highly independent class. I have lived among them, on and off, for some forty years, and during most of those years I also had a home in Wales, and I do not hesitate to say that our village voters are more independent than the rural Welsh, who implicitly follow their instructions given from the chapel pulpit. In this village almost all our labourers voted for the Liberal, and neither here nor at any other village known to me has the smallest pressure been put on them by landlords. They will give you strange reasons for their Liberal vote if you ask them, but it does not in the least follow that they are the real ones. In the last two Elections I think they have seen as clearly as any Scot or Welshman that Tariff Reform is not likely to be good for them. The ignorance of English rural life recently shown by Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. TJre is lamentable. And is there a single Cabinet Minister who sits for an English rural constituency ? I cannot but think that if the Cabinet had been better informed about the con- ditions of our rural life the Education Bill of 1906 would have escaped shipwreck on a point affecting the teachers in rural schools. And if the Chancellor of the Exchequer had known more about us, he might have suppressed many of those rhetorical indiscretions which have done so much to set the better-educated part of our country population against the Government in the contest just finished.—I am, Sir, &c., Kingham, Chipping Norton.
W. WARDE FOWLER.
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