Tales of the Long Bow
But the problem of Enoch Oates, who had made his money in pork, was something profoundly different. As Lord Eden's three supporters eagerly explained to him, seated round a garden table at his beautiful country seat in Somerset, Mr. Oates had done something that the maddest millionaire had never thought of doing before. Up to a certain point he had proceeded in a manner normal to such a foreigner. He had purchased amid general approval an estate covering about a quarter of a county; and it was expected that the would make it a field for some of those American experiments in temperance or eugenics for which the English agricultural populace offer a sort of virgin soil. Instead of that, he suddenly went mad and made a present of his land to his tenants; so that by an unprecedented anomaly the farm`s became the property of the farmers. That an American millionaire should take away English things from England, English rent, English relics, English pictures, English cathedrals or cliffs of Dover, was a natural operation to which everybody was by this time accustomed. But that an American millionaire should give English land to English people was an unwarrantable interference and tantamount to an alien enemy stirring up revolution. Enoch Oates had therefore been sum-
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