Let us leave London, and visit a certain English country town—a market town—as it was in the year 1837. We will then consider the place as it is to-day.

In 1837 it is a quiet town with no industries except those created by the requirements of an agricultural centre. This not only causes a certain amount of activity and trade, but also gives rise to such industries as saddlery, farm implements, etc. The town consists chiefly of two or three streets running parallel, the larger and more important being the High Street. In the middle of the High Street is a square or place, where once a week is held a market, at which all kinds of things are exposed for sale, from poultry to shoe laces. A corn exchange, a branch bank, the town hall, one or two shops, and the principal inn, fill up the square. The inn boasts a large wooden porch, whose pillars are painted to resemble stone. A covered way leads to the stables and stableyard. Within, there is a hall, imperfectly lighted, in which one finds a fly-blown map of the country, a huge pike in a glass case, a stuffed otter, doors leading to the coffee-room and commercial room, a glass partition separating the bar-parlour, with the bar itself in front, and a broad, low staircase leading to the upper rooms. Here, on market day, the farmers hold their ordinary, with deep and long potations to follow. Here the lodge of Freemasons holds its monthly meetings in the winter, with a cheerful time of refreshment after labour. Here the county balls are held twice a year. There is a close, confirmed smell always lingering in the house; it suggests not so much beer and tobacco, which belong to a humbler house of entertainment, as hot brandy and water. The cold meats displayed under glass beside the bar look as if they were imbibing and assimilating that smell. If the windows were sometimes open, one feels, it would make that cold chicken fresher, and would enliven that cold roast beef. When you order dinner at this hostelry let it be of the simplest. Avoid their soup, of which they have but one kind; be careful as to their fish, which has not only travelled fifty miles by train, but has also waited longer than is good for it; but you may trust them entirely in the matter of roast beef and mutton, fowls and “birds.” As regards wine, you will avoid most carefully claret; it is a thick and strong liquid, very heavily “fortified” with brandy. No one in England, as yet, has learned what claret means; they buy it, and they pour brandy into it. Their sherry is a fiery compound, which you must regard with an uncomfortable suspicion; this also has been “treated” with brandy. In the year 1837, if you ask for champagne (which is extremely unusual) you expect a wine sweet and cloying, pink in colour, and served in long narrow glasses which make it look very pretty. In 1837 we all, even among those who have travelled, belong to the age of sweet champagne. We regard the wine, not as the exhilarator-in-chief at human banquets, but as a feminine luxury, suitable for weddings, christenings, Christmas Day, and such other family gatherings in which women take their parts. For ourselves, we shall order what is expected of us, namely stout, with our dinner,—good, thick, foaming stout,—which is without doubt the finest drink ever invented as a companion to beefsteak or to a roast leg of mutton. We shall perhaps, for the good of the house, have a pint of the fiery sherry with the admirable apple pie, seasoned with cloves, which they will presently bring us; and then, for the serious business of the evening, we shall call the landlord and consult him. Which is it to be? Does he recommend the 1820? Has he, perchance, a few bottles left of 1798, though that is almost past praying for? Does he think the 1828 sufficiently matured? Would he recommend that he should set before us some of his Tawny? These questions—these difficulties—are recognised as matters of the greatest importance. There are two of us, we are moderate men; a bottle a head is our humble limit, we must not throw away this moderation upon an inferior bottle. Finally, we yield to him. In port, this landlord, we know from former experience, hath a conscience; he brings us, not the most expensive wine, as a low-class practitioner would do, but the wine which he thinks will please us best. He carries the bottle in his own arms, as if it were a baby; he draws the cork as an actor on the stage opens a letter—with importance; he decants it as if it were liquid elixir, leaving off at the precise moment when a drop from the turbid dregs of the bottle might sully the perfect purity of the splendid purple which he calls upon you to admire, holding the decanter before the light. We take our two bottles; we sit down to dinner at six, so that when the bottles are empty it is no more than nine. We ring the bell and order brandy and water before we go to bed. We hold up the bottle to the light. It is the light of candles, not gas; no nasty, new-fangled gas is allowed in this old inn; and, indeed, those who have once used wax candles can never desire any better or softer light.

In the bedroom the furniture is simple. There is a vast four-poster, with its heavy furniture and valance and curtains. The bed is provided with feather mattresses, deep and soft and sinking, and pillows as deep. There is a washhand-stand, there are two chairs, there is a dressing-table with a looking-glass, there is a chest of drawers. There is nothing else—not a writing-table, not an easy chair; a bedroom is a place, if you please, to sleep in, not to sit in or to work in. If a guest wants to work, let him have a private room and pay for it, unless he can write in the public room.

If a bottle of port was considered a sufficient allowance of drink for a moderate man, what was it for a toper? The amount of drinking in these country inns was, in fact, incredible. Men who were considered quite temperate, as a rule, would sit drinking at a public dinner half the night through. They drank, not weak potations of whisky and Apollinaris, but strong fiery port, which they liked, as Tennyson is reported to have liked it, strong and black and sweet. Not for such drinkers as these did mine host produce his best and rarest; a more common and a ranker liquid did for them. The public dinner was rare. There was generally in the bar-parlour, however, the town toper. He was a man whose father had amassed money in trade and left his son a small fortune, enough to keep him in idleness. The small fortune proved, as usual, a danger and a pitfall; idleness led to temptation, temptation led him to the bar-parlour. We may see him sitting in the wooden armchair, where he spends all his evenings. He is close upon fifty—the toper’s limit. A tumbler of rum and water is on the table beside him. He is silent, for very good reasons. He smiles upon the company to show how sober he is. He has been drinking all day long, and is now quite full and quite drunk; yet at ten o’clock he will get up and walk home by himself without so much as a reel or a lurch. He presents to the world when he goes out into it a nose of a kind that you cannot find now, a red, even a purple nose, largely swollen, covered with red blotches; it is a nose enlarged and painted by rum.

The tradesmen of the town have their club, which meets every night, but not in the tavern; they frequent a place of lesser repute, where they are alone. They are shy of admitting strangers. It is not known how much they drink; but one hears of families where there are daughters who, on the arrival of the familiar footstep, hurry out of the way.

The town is eight miles from any other town. A stage-coach passes through every day, but there is very little done to encourage it. The oldest inhabitant has lived here, man and boy, for eighty years, but he has never seen any other town. The coach drives merrily down the High Street, with the horn blowing: the coachman pulls up at the inn, the passengers all get down and have a drink, the horses are changed, the coachman mounts, the guard blows his horn, and the excitement of the day is over. The interests of the town are wholly self-centred: it is not conscious of any other place. There were wars twenty years ago. There is a fellow, somewhere, who fought at Waterloo; but nobody asks him questions. A weekly paper, published at the nearest town, comes over on Sunday mornings and gives them news of the outer world; but, indeed, the news of the outer world drops on their ears like the murmurs of the ocean in the shell, it means nothing.

The yearly holiday has not yet reached this place. The vicar, the lawyer, the doctor, want no holiday, and take none. The schoolmaster takes his in his garden. Year after year, month after month, day after day, they do the same things in the same way, they have the same talk. As for books they have none, only a dozen or so in a row. Boys who are fond of books are regarded askance; they are dragging down upon their heads a terrible future; no money is to be made by reading books. Boys who are fond of making music, who take to a piano as other boys do to a cricket bat, are considered as in a dangerous way. It is remarkable, and is to me inexplicable, how this country, where formerly every gentleman played some instrument, came to regard music with suspicion. The fact, however, is undoubted. In the same way, a boy who could draw and paint was looked upon with mingled pity and contempt. There was a great deal of caste in the profession chosen by the boys. The vicar’s son went to Oxford or Cambridge and took orders; the lawyer’s eldest son was articled to his father; the doctor’s eldest son was articled to his father; in the principal shops the eldest son was brought up to carry on the shop. The professional people, who called themselves gentlemen, would not associate with the shopkeepers; the county people would not associate with the professional people; thus society was hedged about and kept in gradations. As regards other professions, the banks took some of the young men; one or two turned out to be clever, got scholarships, and went to the universities, there to settle down for life on a College Fellowship; necessity compelled a few into teaching, then considered the last refuge of the destitute; the boy who could draw was articled to an architect in the nearest big town; some went up to London and became clerks; here and there one or two, greatly daring, disappeared altogether beyond the seas.

As for the girls, they stayed at home. Their place was at home, they knew nothing solid in the way of book learning; but, like the London girls, they were accomplished. They could play a little and sing a little, they could do all kinds of fine work, they made all the family pies and cakes, they could distil, they could pickle and preserve, they could make and mend. They stayed at home; out of three or four, one remained unmarried. For her stretched along the road on the west of the town a row of tiny villas, each with its pretty little garden in front full of flowers—dahlias, peonies, geraniums—and the garden behind with its vegetables and its fruit trees. The unmarried one lived here, alone but not lonely. She it was who made most of the society of the place. Sometimes, when there was not enough money, she remained living with the eldest brother—a responsibility which he was never known to refuse. Religion played a great part in their lives. Most of the girls were “serious”: they attended a Thursday evening sermon, which proved it; they read books about election and the elect, which they applied serenely to other people. They were taught that all the people—outside, in the street—in the world were destined to endless torments: all but a very few, including themselves. They believed it, or said they did; and the words never caused them a shudder, a gleam of pity, a thought of remonstrance. That is what they called believing the doctrine.

The Church in 1837 is venerable, but tottering. Within there are high pews, long pews, square pews, pews with a fireplace, pews in the chancel; the organ is in the west gallery where the choir sits. In the middle there is a “three-decker” i.e. a pulpit, a reading-desk, and a clerk’s desk, one above the other. The original east window has been destroyed and is replaced by a modern thing. The charity children sit round the altar rails. The once open roof is squared down and plastered over, half the windows are bricked up, one aisle has been pulled down and rebuilt in brick.

These ladies read little; they went nowhere. London was unknown to them, save for one short visit. They were full of prejudice. They would not visit their right-hand neighbour, because her money—not much of it—came from the drapery trade; nor their left-hand neighbour, because one must draw the line above the farmer’s daughter. They were full of little pretensions. Their papa was formerly the vicar—a gentleman and a scholar; or he was a solicitor, who, though himself sprung from a shop, was a gentleman by right of his profession; therefore his daughters refused to visit their cousins. It was truly wonderful to watch the social hedges raised everywhere.

Somehow or other these hedges troubled the younger folk little. The young man came along in due course. He came to tea, he brought his flute, he stayed to supper—bread and cheese and beer, with a glass of hot brandy and water afterwards. He gazed upon one of the girls; one Sunday evening he presented her with a rose in the church porch. The vicar that evening demonstrated the impossibility of hoping to escape, but the girl with the rose in her hand sat tremulous, flushed, happy. After the sermon the young man walked home with her, the sister giving up her place and walking with the brother. The young man stayed to supper—cold lamb and a lettuce, with beer and a glass of hot brandy and water. They talked of the sermon of despair, and the text, with no escape possible. While they talked, the spring of love was welling up in the girl’s young heart—thus is the soundest theology mocked by Nature. In two or three months there followed the wedding, with the breakfast and the pink champagne.

Not every country town has experienced this decline; some few have escaped, but all have suffered more or less which depend entirely on the agricultural interest. Of one class I speak with great sympathy—the Nonconformist ministers. They were none too well paid in the most palmy days. The chapel contained perhaps a hundred and twenty members; these members paid two shillings a quarter each for his seat, or eight shillings a year. There was no endowment; the minister therefore received forty pounds a year. This was increased by voluntary gifts from the richer members of the congregation, so that the minister probably reckoned on a hundred or a hundred and twenty pounds a year for his stipend. Now, alas! there are no richer members, there are no voluntary offerings; the poor man has to keep himself and his family on forty pounds a year.

What is this country town like after all these years? There are a few changes in the buildings, but not many. The market-place, the corn exchange, the cross, the old inn, are all there. The church has been restored; the pillars have been deprived of their plaster and are once more of polished stone, the high pews are replaced by low benches, the roof is opened up, the east window is restored, other windows are in course of restoration; it is now a noble and very beautiful old church. The organ and choir have been sent to the chancel; the “three-decker” has made way for a small and richly-carved pulpit; there is light, colour, brightness in the church and its decorations, a light and colour which appear also in the service.

The other changes in the town are not so apparent. You will find, however, that the farmers’ ordinary is no longer held—the times are now too bad. Nor do gentlemen drink port all the evening; the old port is all gone. The inn is a house of call for bicyclists, who drink beer or tea; there are not so many finely appointed dog-carts driving in and out—landlords, like their tenants, are badly hit. The market is not so well attended—there are fewer rustics. The saddler especially is a melancholy man, because the agricultural depression has struck him hard—a man can go on using an old saddle for years. All the shopkeepers, however, are gloomy, their shops hardly yield them a living. The lawyer’s income has suffered grievously, so has the doctor’s; their daughters have left the town and are getting their own living by working at something or other. All the young men have gone. Everybody leaves the town who can, for it is a place of decay.

Yet is the town really brighter and better than before; far and wide its arms stretch out to its sons who have gone away. Some are ranching in Canada, some are fruit farming in California, some are practising medicine on Ocean Liners or in colonial towns, some are teaching in schools and colleges at home and in the colonies, some are labourers on farms in Manitoba or British Columbia, soon to be themselves owners of farms. The town is poorer, there are fewer people; yet, apart from money, it is a far richer place than it was, with broader minds, with fewer prejudices, and greater knowledge.