32 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



more happily situated, countries our realisation of town minds is 

 only a second best. Still, if we are in earnest and seeking to repeople 

 our countryside and cultivate its comparative waste, the tendency 

 spoken of ought certainly not to be neglected, but we should make 

 a point of catching our designate future small holders in youthful 

 years and beginning the desired transformation while their temper 

 is tender and mouldable. However, such mouldable temper wants 

 to be worked up in the right way, not only by making it do 

 things for itself — which is no over-inviting task — but by bringing 

 a competent guiding mind to bear upon it in its work individually, 

 not merely in the ruck — and not in the schoolroom, but also at 

 rural work. It is the man — or, in the case of a girl, the woman — 

 thoroughly knowing his or her subject, working directly upon the 

 boy or girl, showing rather than telling them what to do and how 

 to do it, and letting the young person produce something for himself 

 or herself, that creates the knowledge which will remain and the 

 taste which will become rooted in the slowly forming character. 

 For, according to Pope, " as the twig is bent, the tree inclines." 



The Americans have been quicker to discern in what manner 

 this inborn natural bent in the child's character may be effectively 

 turned to account for sound preparation for country life and country 

 pursuits. A child's mind is plastic, generative, full of hidden power. 

 You may compare it to a grain of corn. Swaddle the grain up in 

 mummy bandages and bury it in a pyramid, and it will lie inactive 

 and inert however long time you may give it— thousands of years, 

 as in mummy- wheat. Place it in the right soil, warm it with golden 

 sunshine and water it with silver rain, give it its proper treatment 

 and its proper nutriment in sufficient quantity, but in the right form, 

 the ammonia and potash not as caustics, the phosphate not in the 

 shape of old-fashioned half-inch bones or coarsely-ground basic 

 slag, in which it will lie unassimilated in the soil for years — but so 

 prepared as to be readily assimilable, and it will bear fruit a hundred- 

 fold, plump, sound grain, qualified to serve both as food to the eater 

 and seed to the sower. Lessons are good and books are good. 

 However, for the task that we have in hand, seeing, handling, doing 

 and exploring in the book " in which he that runs may read " is a 

 thousand times better. With our " watered down town teaching " 

 applied to the country we have to a considerable extent mummified 

 our human grain. The Americans are now — since about a decade 

 of years — going on a different and better tack — a tack which 

 unmistakably leads by a shorter cut to the desired goal. They 

 teach the child agriculture, so it is quite true, in elementary rural 



