That is how I see it. Whatever changes may have come and may be coming in the economic conditions of landholding, and of agricultural labour, the life of the country house, large or small, goes on much the same as ever, and will go on. Where it can no longer be supported by the land, it is supported by money made elsewhere. English people like the flavour of country life, and it is very seldom that a man who has made his fortune in business does not eventually buy or rent a country house. Many of the big estates in the United Kingdom have been acquired of late years by rich Americans, who buy them, I suppose, not as an investment in property, but because they also are attracted by the flavour of English country life. Country houses, from the great house such as is represented here by Abington Abbey down to the little house such as Stone Cottage, are scattered all over England, and I should say that in nine cases out of ten, taking large and small together, the people who inhabit them have no concern with the land, in the way of drawing any part of their income from it, or of dealing with it as a productive agency. They have not come "back to the land" in any essential sense; they have only come back to the country. I believe that no economic changes that may affect those who live by the land, whether as employers or labourers, will much affect the social life of English country houses.
As far as my novels are concerned, it is simply a question of placing the sort of people whom I know best in the surroundings of which I like to write. Where my characters are in direct contact with the business of the land, or are affected by it, I do not shirk reference to it, as far as it seems to bear upon the main purpose of my story. But I have not set out to present an all-round picture of the conditions of country life in any of the fictional districts I have chosen as the scene of my novels. The great majority of the inhabitants of any countryside are the people who work on the land and live by it, and these I have left out almost entirely; not because I do not recognise their actual importance, but because in the social scene of my stories they would not appear, or only in a very minor degree. It may be an unsatisfactory state of things which divides people off in that way, into social strata, but it undoubtedly exists, and it is not the business of a novelist to justify the conditions he finds, but to reflect them; unless, of course, he sets out to make a discussion of those conditions the basis of his story.