234	ENGL1SHSAGA
beef from the Argentine made the work of the English farmer
superfluous. In the next two decades more than four million
acres of arable land went out of cultivation, and more than
half a million workers left the country for the town. Against
the competition of the new lands the farmer was powerless; a
bad season spelt ruin, for a diminished turnover could no longer
be offset by a rise in price. Falling rents, mortgages and bank
overdrafts broke the back of the smaller squires before death
duties and rising taxes drove them in the next generation from
their ancient homes and lands. Only the very rich who had
urban estates to offset rural and the farm labourer, helped after
1884 by the vote and the rising tide of social conscience, prospered
a little in the general tide of decay. But the heart was going out
of British farming. Henceforward the old conception of home
as a 'place permanently associated with man's life and labour to
be inherited from his forebears and transmitted to his children
w^s for most Englishmen a thing of the past. The utilitarians
thought of home only as a shelter from the weather. They
could not see the need far beauty and continuity in human life.
Under their guidance and that of the manufacturers and changers
of money to whose keeping they trustfully committed England
more factory workers could be supported with cheap food than
ever before. But from the plain man, on whose character,
integrity and valour England in the last resort rested, something
precious had been taken away. The home smoke rising from
the valley, the call of the hours from the belfry, the field of
rooks and elms, had given place to a tenement in the land of the
coal truck and the slag heap. Here his life was cast and the
earliest memories of his children formed.
•         ••••••	•
Yet the dream remained in pathetic attempts to keep curtains
white in grimy back rooms above East London railway yards
or to grow flowers in window-boxes in Bolton and Oldham. And
English history suggested that whenever for any reason English-
men failed to find the elements of home, as they conceived them,
in their own land, they tended to seek them overseas. Such had
been the history of the colonisation of the transatlantic virgin
It is capital cold, it is excellent hot;
And, if a large number of children you're got,
Twill greatly assist you in boiling the pot . . ."
Punck.LXm, 78.