Page:Our Common Land (and other short essays).djvu/35

 communication; and that is what in this paper I wish most emphatically to enforce. Each has knowledge the other requires; separated, they are powerless; combined, they may do much. For I have drawn miserable pictures of the weakness of both, but see on the other hand what each has of strength. The clergy have all that is pitiful, all that is generous in the hearts of their richer parishioners on their side the power of calling out workers from among them, the power of directing a large part of their alms, the distribution of money, the leadership of the men. Besides these they have the enormous accumulated knowledge of the poor, gathered in long years of intimate observation of them in their homes a mass of information over which they may not have much time to brood, and from which they may not be in the habit of generalising, yet what might not the theorists learn from it?

And the visitors. I have called them inexperienced, and I might have added that their