GREEN LAND FAR AWAY 27

English society were fast taming them1—insisted on their ancient
rights of private trading and of receiving tips from clients, kept
shops and pubs and drank spirits in office hours. For according to
the old English reckoning a man who did his duty had a right to
do it as he pleased.

Any interference by the State not established by prescription
was viewed with abhorrence. This explains the ease with which
the urban and radical doctrine of laissez-faire captured the
mind of the older England. A magistrate told some poor
pavement vendors, arrested by an officious policeman for
selling water-cress in Marylebone High Street, that they had
as good a right to sell their wares as other people to dispose of
anything else. When Income Tax, abolished after the .Napoleonic
Wars amid the loudest cheering ever recorded in the'Tiistory of
the House of Commons, was reintroduced in 1842 at 7d. in the
£ it was regarded as an almost intolerable inquisition which
struck at the freedom and privacy of every respectable English-
man. "Private affairs must be divulged," commented a news-
paper, "private feelings outraged—malicious curiosity gratified
—poor shrinking pride, be it never so honest, humbled and put to
the blush—deceit and the meanness of petty trickery, encouraged
in evasion—and much appalling immorality spread with the
abandonment of truth. Many a gentleman will sicken over the
forms he has to bear with; and many a tradesman will become
either ruined or a rogue."

The more rustic the scene, the stronger this almost exaggea>
ated passion for independence. Fred Bettesworth, farmer's boy,
wishing to see the world, left a master with whom he was per-
fectly happy without a word and waited on Staines Bridge till he
found a carter to give hrm new employment. A year or two later,
sooner .than be tied, and feeling he had "a kind o' roamin* com-
mission," he left another master and tramped forty miles into
Sussetf to see the country.2 Every summer for many years he did
the same. In the villages of Whittlebury Forest, almost every
householder was a poacher: a decade or two back when the game-
keepers of the enclosing lords had failed .in the face of local
opinion to make an arrest for nutting in the forest, the whole
village of Silverstone turned out armed with staves to repel

lTKcir traditional holidays, forty-two a year in 1830, were reduced by 1834 to four.
Victorian England it 178*
NQtettin, English folk jo.