It will be said that this was not the country proper, nor was it, for London has annexed every place within fifty miles of Charing Cross.  But in the country proper a new difficulty met me:  not only were there no empty cottages, but landowners stuck to their acres with such jealous obstinacy that they refused to sell a rood of land for a cottage on any terms whatever.  I will give one example, which may be taken as typical.  There was a Welsh valley where I had once spent a summer holiday, exquisitely retired and beautiful—­a dozen miles from the nearest railway.  Beyond the green strath, with its few white cottages and farms, rose on every side the wide hills, with Snowdon towering over all like a dome.  The hillside land had but a prairie value.  It had never been cultivated.  A few sheep strayed over it; but for months together no human foot trod its heather, or wandered by its vociferous cascades.  One would have supposed that had any one offered to build a house on these solitary hillsides, the owner of the land would have been only too glad to have fostered a folly that would have proved remunerative to himself.  On the contrary, the two great landowners of the district stuck to every inch of soil as if it had been sown with gold.  The land was quite useless, as I have said.  It might have been worth three pounds an acre—­yet they refused fifty.  They would not even let on lease.  Nor could it be pretended that the scenery would have lost any element of its charm by a cottage that would have been scarcely observed on those vast slopes of Snowdon.  Jealous obstinacy, the desire to keep intact their own, the desire to keep out all intruders—­this was the temper of the landowners.  They did all they could to harass their existing tenants.  A tenant whose family had increased so that his cottage was as overcrowded as a tenement in Spitalfields, had to plead long before he was allowed to add a couple of rooms to his cottage, even when he did so at his own expense.  Often enough he was refused so harshly, that he was constrained to seek a house in some other district.  Yet, in all that valley, which was five miles long by two in breadth, there were not two hundred houses; and there rose around them the unpopulated hillside, where a host of people might have lived in health, and where, indeed, men had once lived, as was witnessed by the roofless gables which here and there rose among the heather.

It seems to me that in this state of things there is a monstrous injustice.  There is no law to compel these gentlemen to sell land, and there is no public sentiment that can affect them.  They are the complete despots of the countryside.  If a man does not like their domination, he leaves the district; he knows that it is vain to resist it.  In this way many rural districts are depopulated, or kept under-populated, simply to gratify the selfish temper of a great proprietor.  It is not as though he lived in the district, and wished to keep its beauties