and the Dragon. He sees too clearly the downright facts of life. He has
no interest in fighting, and he does not want to fight. Being the one
honest man in the community--the one man who creates, not only his own
food but the food of others besides, and who knows the value of his
work, he perceives without illusion the foolery of War, the hideous
waste of it, the shocking toll of agony and loss which it inflicts--and
if left to himself would as a rule have no hand in it. It is only
occasionally--when ground down beyond endurance by the rent-racking
classes above him, or threatened beyond endurance by an enemy from
abroad, that he turns his reaping-hook into a sword and his muck-fork
into a three-pronged bayonet, exchanges his fowling-piece for a rifle,
and fights savagely for his home and his bit of a field.

England, curiously enough, is almost the only country in the world where
the peasant or ordinary field-worker _has_ no field of his own[22]; and
I find that in the villages and among the general agricultural
population there is even now but little enthusiasm for the present
war--though the raid on our coasts at Scarborough and other places
certainly did something to stimulate it. Partly this is, as I have said,
because the agricultural worker knows that his work is foundational, and
that nothing else is of importance compared with it. [At this moment,
for instance, there are peasants in Belgium and Northern France
ploughing and sowing, and so forth, actually close to the trenches and
between the fighting lines.] Partly it is because in England, alas! the
countryman _has_ so little right or direct interest in the soil. One
wonders sometimes why he _should_ feel any enthusiasm. Why should men
want to fight for their land when they have no land to fight for--when
the most they can do is to die at the foot of a trespass-board, singing,
"Britons never, never shall be slaves!"