Steam mechanisation is becoming a growing threat to the agricultural worker and the perceptive are increasingly worried at the prospect of revolution in England. In Wales and Scotland, solutions to the problems of their agriculture have been found by effectively driving the bulk of their people off the Land. Ireland, of course, has its own problems and short-sighted bloody answers.
The bulk of English farmers are blithely unaware of any problem – the price of corn is high so there is no need to change anything.
Lord Palfrey can see disaster ahead and is primarily concerned with saving his own family from impending doom. The solution may lie overseas in the newly built Empire that has happened suddenly and without any conscious volition on the part of government or country. Palfrey’s family is enlarging and the children are growing older and increasingly precocious, and he, too, is being swept away in a great tide of almost incomprehensible change. He may not be able to guide the changes affecting him, but he can do his best to profit from them.
