LIVING in the country and reading the London papers, one is very often struck by the total difference of outlook between those who make the laws, those who write or speak in public about them, and those who endure them.

Here, in a corner of Blankshire, we see the working of the national machinery from one point of view, our own, but from that point of view we see it very plainly.

Perhaps I had better first of all describe this district of Blankshire.

It is what might be called a semi-rural place. A fine county town gives us a sense of dignity, and the proximity of two very rapidly growing seaside resorts gives us markets and threatens to engulf much of our beautiful country-side, while our lovely villages attract the ghastly bungalows of the small holders and not a few multiple shops which deface our rambling streets. We are also within range of a growing industrial neighbourhood.

This is all to say that our country-side is prosperous. Those of our farmers who go in for milk and small produce do well as long as they chiefly employ their own families. If they will grow corn and insist on having many farm hands, those follies are punished by the losses they entail. We are sorry for the individuals who lose, but we can think of no remedy. We read, indeed, of this or that Cabinet Minister or ex-Minister talking about the land and what it could and should produce, and we shrug our shoulders, knowing that, until the town leaves off" buying in the cheapest market," certain essential food-stuffs cannot be grown in our part of the country, though we have farmers and soil second to none.

Sometimes we go so far as to wonder whether the "cheapest market " is so very cheap after all, when we see the land around us going out of cultivation and read the total of our foreign bills for food-stuffs, but we have no time or knowledge of how to point this out, nor any platform from which to speak. And we are in general very distrustful of public speaking. What does he know about it?" we say, when anyone, who is himself unused to the land, comes along with a remedy. And we say this, I am afraid, without regard to the merits of the plan and as a general attitude to all theorists.

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You see, we have had a lot of disappointments. We were going to have an agricultural minimum wage, linked

to the price of corn and sustained by Government. But that never came off. We hoped we were going to have some protection of our produce, but this did not materialize ; and our farmers, who were patriots" and " and "defeaters of submarines " during the war, have now become "grasping and "greedy," to say nothing of "backward" and oppressive to the labourer, and so forth.

Then we are ill at ease in other ways. It seemed to our labourers a wonderfully good plan to have their wages raised, while their rents were fixed and their cottages secured to them, but it hasn't worked quite as you might expect. For one thing, people left off building cottages to let: they only build to sell; and for another, bad characters who will not work cannot be moved to make way for respectable ones who will. Then the rents of the very few cottages available have quadrupled, so that if a man leaves his job and his cottage he is much poorer, and he is aggravated by the sight of empty cottages that the owner dare not let for fear of not being able to get possession again. For no agreement to give the cottage up on a certain day can be enforced on the cottager apparently, and strange to say, this does not help him to find a house.

Then with what pæans of joy our local innovators greeted the downfall of the two big local squires! The great houses are now shut and will be dismantled, and the squires have gone to live in two former farmhouses, while the farmers have been put in roomy cottages. That makes two cottages less for labourers. Other cottages have been sold to pay death duties and super-taxes. They have been bought by "gentry " who have become poorer.

It seemed a beautiful idea to take away the rich man's money, but the absorbtion of the poor man's houses by another class was not foreseen, nor the general reluctance to own cottage property. In old days the village tradesmen used to invest in cottages, but now they prefer to put their money elsewhere, and no one can be surprised.

The misadventures of Mr. Brown, the butcher of Blankey, are widely quoted. Here is the story as it is related in these parts. Mr. Brown, a hard-working, careful man, invested his money before the war in two cottages. One he lives in, the other he lets. This last being vacant a few years ago, he put a bill in the window. What was his delight when a pleasant stranger came along and offered him 128. a week, the cottage not being worth so much. Mr. Brown closed with the offer at once, and the stranger moved in with his family.

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After a few months Mr. Brown raised the delicate question of rent. The indignant stranger instantly had the matter brought to the notice of the law, which, invoked in this way, reproved Mr. Brown for profiteering and assessed the rent at 8s. a week. Mr. Brown had, after the manner of his kind, no sort of documentary evidence that he had been offered 12s. The stranger has never paid any rent at all, and has announced that he is a Communist. This does not prevent his letting one room in Mr. Brown's house for 10s. a week.

Mr. Brown regards his investment now as a bad debt. He might succeed in turning out his inconvenient tenant if he went to law, or he might not; he prefers not to try.

Who would have thought that all these well-meant laws to give the poor man a house would have produced such tangles with such repercussions on the poor man himself? But so it is. Who would have thought that taxation would have brought the "gentry" to live in workmen's cottages? But it has, and there they are.

And something of the same kind is happening about land, for land cannot now safely be let for market gardening, the law giving the tenant a fixed holding; so that, unless the market gardener can buy, he cannot easily get land, and the lovely plan by which he could permanently acquire someone else's land for a rental and without having to buy it does not help him as was thought, and a lot of land in our neighbourhood is thereby not put to its best use.

There are a lot more things that puzzle and disturb us down here. We do not understand the working of the dole nor of parish relief. The two can be given at once, it appears. The latter is, we know, given to families earning very high wages, and we think our money should be more carefully spent.

We are also very dissatisfied with education, believing that what is taught in our local elementary schools is utterly unfitted for our-or indeed any-children. We observe that when evening continuation classes are given, even in our purely agricultural parishes, that agriculture is not referred to. The courses are only suited to clerks and commercial travellers. We also see our clergy being edged out of the Church schools, and our schoolmasters with double the salary of the clergy but minus their aspirates. We see a general decay of rustic skill and, more serious, of family life, except among people of very determined character. The remedy for some of these troubles is in our own hands, if we knew how to use our powers, but we get entangled

with generalities and lose sight of the trees for looking at the wood.

The great theories of political parties roll over our heads, but when the theory turns into law, we groan under the disabilities imposed upon us, and when election-time comes round we are once more confounded and bewildered by conflicting offers of which we cannot judge. We see the injustice perpetrated, but we do not always see the perpetrator. And recent changes in the name of progress very often seem to us unwanted and wasteful. We should like to return to a stability which we have lost; to have village schools that would fit our children for life without the inordinate modern extravagances; to have the security of our own property and of our own jobs, not the perpetual flux of uncertainty. Is this impossible? In Blankshire we cannot think so. But our voice does not carry as far as London, and we have no knowledge of the great world of politics to tell us how to bring our grievances to the ears of those in power.

A COUNTRY COUSIN

VOL. LXXXVII

THE FIRST VOYAGE OF AMERIGO
VESPUCCI, 1497

THERE has been, perhaps, no controversy carried on more bitterly than that regarding the Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci, whose memory will pass down the ages in the name of the great western continent. Honoured in life, and dying holding the highest maritime post in Spain, at that time the most powerful seafaring nation of the world, he was barely interred before he was accused of deliberately filching a continent from its discoverer, and giving it his own name. For centuries he was branded as a thief; now, although through the strenuous efforts of his defenders that accusation has been successfully refuted, he is none the less accused, and generally held guilty, of fraudulently inventing the voyage upon which his title rests.

Amerigo Vespucci, the third son of Anastasio Vespucci, was born on March 9, 1451, at Florence, of which city his father was a notary. His education was carried out under the charge of his uncle, Fra Giorgio, an ardent supporter of Savonarola, and embraced Latin and the sciences of mathematics and astronomy. A fellow student was Piero Soderini, who afterwards rose to be Gonfaloniere of Florence during the Medici's ten years' exile.

Vespucci entered the service of the mercantile house of the Medici, and in 1492 was engaged for them in Cadiz, where he yet remained in 1495. Two years later, in May 1497, he went to sea with four ships, returning to Cadiz in October the following year, having, according to his own account, discovered upwards of 850 leagues of coast. On May 16th of the following year he sailed as pilot in Ojeda's expedition to the shores of South America, and, on his return, after a short sojourn in Seville, he went to Portugal. Here he took service for the King, and engaged in two voyages towards the south-west. On the first of these he attained the highest southern latitude to that time, 52° S.

In 1504 he left the service of Portugal and returned to Spain, paying a visit to Columbus at Seville as he passed through on his way to Madrid. The great Admiral entrusted to his care a letter to his son, who was then pleading his cause at Court, in which he speaks of Vespucci in high terms: "The bearer of this letter . . . is a very respectable

man.

Fortune has been adverse to him, as to many others.