The lot of the English landed proprietor, felt Mr. Carmody, is not what it used to be in the good old times. When the first Carmody settled in Rudge he had found little to view with alarm. those were the days when churls were churls, and a scurvy knave was quite content to work twelve hours a day, Saturdays included, in return for a little black bread and an occasional nod of approval from his overlord. But in this twentieth century England's peasantry has degenerated. Modern sons of the soil expect coddling. Their roofs leak, and you have to mend them; their walls fall down and you have to build them up; their lanes develop holes and you have to restore the surface, and all this runs into money. The way things were shaping, felt Mr. Carmody, in a few years a landlord would be expected to pay for the repairs of his tenants' wireless sets.
(from Money For Nothing, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
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