Social Reform and Folk Dancing

Now that I'm done with my last paper, I've been looking at random papers and books in the archive. I'm about to go look at the Book of Kells (squee!), but until then, here's an excerpt from The English Folk Dance Society's journal, which had two issues in 1914-1915:

If it appears to you, therefore, as certainly as it appears to me, in watching
country people dancing, that their Folk Dance is genuine self-expression,
our part in the movement must be clear. We cannot stand aside from a
distribution, as it were, of keys to a spiritual kingdom. God knows there are
people now in the coun-try
to whom any life of the spirit is denied for want
of decent housing and clothing and food. None the less the prevailing
starvation of the countryside to-day is starvation of soul. Many causes have
brought this about, not the smallest among them being the unimaginative
sabbatarianism of Wilberforce and his friends, which, arising in a class
possessing abundant diversions, stultified the labourer's only playtime.
These men's eyes-the eyes of our grandfathers among these sabbatarians-
were set upon the noblest ends. Only they did not understand the winding
ways of the spirit. Their thoughts were too short-cut and too business-like.
So, on the heels of their belittling of human instincts, followed, in our fathers'
youth, an arrogant, individualistic materialism. To my mind the Country
Dancing movement is one of the signs that our grandfathers', our fathers',
and our own, thoughts have come the full circle-encompassed a truth, the
separate sides of which Puritan piety and reactionary atheism attempted
to grasp.
"We feel we are nothing-for all is Thou and in Thee;
We feel we are something-that also has come from Thee" (3).

There's far more than that, about finding some way to prevent the loss of hard-working peasants to the metropolitan areas like Manchester and London. But I found it interesting how they justified folk dancing in these terms.