The average county council, though popularly elected, is composed in agricultural England of landowners and the bigger farmers, who, as a common rule, do not favour a land programme for labourers, and are anxious to keep down the rates.

The rural district council and board of guardians are equally averse from any display of public enterprise, and the parish council, which often consists mainly of labourers, rarely accomplishes anything except at the prompting, or with the sanction, of the parochial landowner.

The result is that allotments, rural housing, village baths and washhouses, an adequate water supply, public halls and libraries, are not regarded as the concern of rural elected authorities, but are left to the private enterprise of landowners.
Civic pride, which glories in the public proprietorship of lands and libraries, tramways and lodging-houses, waterworks and workmen's dwellings, art galleries and swimming baths, and is a living influence in the municipalities of, let us say, London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, Birmingham, West Ham, and many a smaller borough, does not exist in rural councils.

To the farmer and the peasant public ownership is a new and alien thing.

The common lands and all the old village communal life have gone out of the memory of rural England; but the feudal tradition that the landowner is the real centre of authority has survived, and it is the benevolent landowner who is expected to build cottages, grant allotments, and see to the water supply, as fifty years ago he built and managed the village school.