When Mrs. Fisher comes to discuss the conditions of rural England after the Napoleonic wars, she has an encouraging message for us in our quite similar plight to-day. A hundred years ago the English countryside was a gloomy scene of poverty, bankruptcy, starvation and every sort of distress, lighted up only by the lurid flames from burning ricks and the flaring torches of the Machine Breakers, for want had brought riot in its train. Conditions then were far worse than they are to-day, and yet the worst was over within twenty years of Waterloo.