In every inch of England you can find the history of England.  You find it very typically here.  The growth of that leisured class which we still enjoy—­the class that in the seventeenth century destroyed the central government of the Crown, penetrated and refreshed the universities, acquired for its use and reformed the endowed primary education of the English, and began a thorough occupation of our public land—­the growth of that leisured class is nowhere more clearly to be seen than in the history of the Fens, since the Fens had their faith removed from them.

Here is the story of one such family, a family without whose privileges and public services it would be difficult to conceive modern England.  Their wealth is rooted in the Fens; the growth of that wealth is parallel to the growth of every fortune by which we are governed.

When the monasteries were despoiled and their farms thrown open to a gamble, when the water ran in again, the countryside and all its generations of human effort were drowned, there was raised up for the restoration of this land the family of Russell.

The Abbey of Thorney had been given to these little squires.  They were in possession when, towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, in 1600, was passed the General Draining Act.  It was a generous and a broad Act:  it was to apply not only to the Great Level, but to all the marshes of the realm.  It was soon bent to apply to the family.

Seven years later a Dutchman of the name of Cornelius Vermuyden was sent for, that the work might be begun.  For fifty years this man dug and intrigued.  He was called in to be the engineer; he had the temerity to compete with the new landlords; he boasted a desire—­less legitimate in an alien than in a courtier—­to make a great fortune rapidly.  He was ruined.

All the adventurers who first attempted the draining of the Fens were ruined—­but not that permanent Russell-Francis, the Earl of Bedford, surnamed “the Incomparable.”

The story of Vermuyden by him is intricate, but every Englishman now living on another man’s land should study it.  Vermuyden was to drain the Great Level and to have 95,000 acres for his pains.  These acres were in the occupation—­for the matter of that, in great part the ownership—­of a number of English families.  It is true the land had lain derelict for seventy years, bereft of capital since the Reformation, and swamped.  It is true that the occupiers (and owners) were very poor.  It is true, therefore, that they could not properly comprehend a policy that was designed for the general advantage of the country.  They only understood that the hunting and fishing by which they lived were to stop; that their land was to be very considerably improved and taken from them.  In their ignorance of ultimate political good they began to show some considerable impatience.