This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1888 edition. Excerpt: ...In seeing the meet, he will see the country club; for this is the great social as well as the great sporting gathering, and the gentleman in an English county whodoes not hunt must find his life somewhat lonely and dull. Rents have fallen immensely in consequence of the agricultural depression, caused by the influx of American and Indian grain into the British market; nor is there any prospect of better times. Mortgage debts are heavy, and the allowances to widows and younger brothers, which the system of primogeniture entails, have still to be paid. Thus the situation of the squire, and of the social structure which he crowns, is perilous. Will he bravely face it? Will he cut down his luxuries, learn agriculture, become his own bailiff, give up game-preserving, and renounce idleness and pleasure-hunting, for a life of labour and duty 1 If he does, agricultural depression may prove to him a blessing in disguise. But it is too likely that instead of this, he will shut up the Hall and go away to the city, or perhaps to the Continent, there to live in reduced sybaritism on the remnant of his rents. The Hall will then either stand vacant, like the chateau after the Revolution, or pass, as not a few of them have already passed, with its ancestral portraits and memories, into the hands of the rich trader or the Jew, perhaps of the American millionaire, who finds better service and more enjoyment of wealth in the less democratic world. A change is evidently at hand, for land can no longer support the three orders of agriculture, landlord, tenant farmer, and labourer. If the Established Church is abolished, as in all likelihood it will be, and the rector departs as well as the squire, the revolution in the rural society of England will be...
