Excerpt from A Short History of English Rural Life: From the Anglo-Saxon Invasion to the Present Time The old Squires of England were not always wise and were sometimes despotic, but they were, as a class, imbued with a traditional sense of honour, integrity, patriotism and sympathetic knowledge of their poorer neighbours which are not so markedly characteristic of the more progressive plutocracy which has largely replaced them. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.