20 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



trade unions and similar organisations it exercises most potent 

 influence in the affairs, economic, political and social, of the nation. 



But where is his rural brother ? He, too, has been enfranchised — 

 though practically only about three lustra later. He, too, has been 

 educated — unfortunately too much upon the same mould as his 

 urban classmate. Is it not that which is in fault, that which has 

 caused so great a dissimilarity in the results ? In the words of the 

 Latin proverb, we have been giving bones to eat to the ass, or else 

 chaff to the dog. One man's meat, so we ought to know, may be 

 the other man's poison. The same sun which in the C6te d'Or ripens 

 the juice of the delicate grapes, advisedly exposed to its warming 

 rays, to a delicious wine, will shrivel up the more abundant and more 

 luscious " Aramon" of the Midi to unprofitable refuse. Magnetise 

 a piece of iron and it will automatically turn to the north, whatever 

 position you may place it in. The Turks knew well what they were 

 about when they sent their " blood-tax " Greek children to Egypt 

 to be there turned into Janissaries. They there forgot " their own 

 people and their father's house." For at least about five decades 

 we have kept carefully magnetising our rural child with the urban 

 magnet. What wonder that his mind turns instinctively town wards ? 

 We have been janissarising our young Greek. And he has been 

 brought to despise his gens and his own beautiful country, in which 

 there is plenty for him to pick up. But that is not all. For we 

 have — others are in the same boat ; the same complaint comes even 

 from specifically agricultural and free America — not only treated 

 our country child to town schooling, but we have necessarily, under 

 essentially differing circumstances, given it that town teaching in 

 a weakened, degenerated, watered down form, which could not 

 possibly produce analogous results. Add that to the removal of 

 those naturally, automatically educating influences of home life in a 

 diminutive exploitation, and how can we be astonished at the 

 emerging of a disappointing Frankenstein 1 



What is it, so let me ask, that we avowedly educate children for — 

 either at home or at school ? Is it to fill their young heads with a 

 certain number of cast-iron formulae, which may or may not convey 

 a distinct meaning to their brains, which may or may not prove 

 useful to them in their future fife, and which they are only too likely 

 to forget after having mechanically got them by heart ? Or is it 

 to fit them as well as possible under the circumstances, for the calling 

 and life which is actually to become theirs, making them as useful 

 in it as can be ? 



The rural child is not a town child. We could not indeed tie him 



