EDUCATION. 105 



German territory into a multitude of freehold holdings 

 opens a prospect of independent competency to every peasant 

 labourer who carries a head upon his shoulders and chooses 

 to learn. Contact with others, in military service and 

 otherwise — not least in those thousands of co-operative 

 and other societies which overspread the country and place 

 instructive companionship within reach of even the most 

 humble — the comparatively most isolated cultivator — serves 

 to whet his ambition to rise upon the " ladder " in Germany 

 placed effectively before him. 



Conditions are different in France. But still, owing in 

 the main to the large division of the soil, its accessibiUty 

 to purchase and — at present, when a diminishing population 

 has so greatly reduced competition and so considerably 

 lowered the current price of land, thus improving greatly 

 the prospect of making a good hving out of it — the number 

 of earnest seekers after instruction adds not a little to the 

 fruitfulness of the work of those able and willing teachers 

 — at Colleges, in the offices of departmental " Directors 

 of Agriculture," and among lecturers employed by the 

 numerous " Agricultural Syndicates " — which, as Lord Reay 

 has attested, have worked " wonders " in the matter of 

 rural and agricultural education, and which also make it their 

 particular task to extend agricultural education. At the 

 same time local conditions maintain that love of land which 

 has long been a traditional characteristic of the French 

 peasantry, so painstaking in its pursuit of special branches 

 of husbandry. 



The most pervasive systems of Agricultural Education, 

 tending to keep people true to their agricultural calling, 

 faithful to the land on which they were born, expert, more 

 in particular, in the various methods of husbandry which 

 make up small and medium farming, and eager to perfect 

 themselves in agricultural knowledge, are those of Denmark 

 and Switzerland. Both countries are particularly favoured 

 by the dependence of the community specifically upon the 

 smaller kind of husbandry, which lends prestige to the 

 agricultural calling, as representing the premier industry 

 of the land. Belgium and the Netherlands are likewise 



