ABSTRACT
THE last half of the nineteenth century saw the final disintegration of the unique and individually stable way of life which characterized agricultural society. The food-producing England with its rural life and scenes, so lovingly described by her painters and her poets, gave place to the rising prosperity of a great industrial and mechanised nation. While the decay of agriculture at home led to the development of emigration to the rich-yielding farmlands of Canada and the Antipodes, the overseas competition from the continent in industrial skills and techniques led to a more organised efficiency at home, seen perhaps most effectively in the new legislation dealing with education and with local government and the growth of the civil service. Democracy became more collective and more bureaucratic, and the social reformers now spent their energy on the one hand in attacking the distribution of wealth or on the other in fighting to ensure a scientific organisation of benevolence in contrast to indiscriminate philanthropy.
