EDUCATION. 119 



young men to emigrate into some new country, that educa- 

 tion strongly tempts those who receive it to seek a better 

 position than agricultural labour can afford them, as clerks 

 or factory hands. That is what our elementary education, 

 measured \nth a procrustean rule, prepares them for, and 

 certainly not for rural life and agricultural work. We 

 observe the difference in the contrasting effect which the 

 education of " our masters " has had severally upon town 

 and country population. Our industrial working classes 

 have grown to be a different race from what they were 

 fifty years ago — far more intellectual, more independent, 

 much better versed in business, conducting their magnificent 

 co-operative stores and other undertakings with remarkable 

 ability, holding their heads high, taking a leading part in 

 politics, supplying the Treasury Bench with distinctly 

 capable occupants, who help to shape the destinies of the 

 Empire, and respected by other classes. Where are all 

 these attainments among the rural population ? Where 

 are their Burts and Barneses, their G. H. Robertses and 

 Hodges ? We have had one Joseph Arch. But even he was 

 not remotely fitted for the tasks very properly assigned to 

 the men named. What disposed him to lead a revolt 

 was simply an instinctive yearning for liberty and indepen- 

 dence on behalf of his class. You can tell the tree by its 

 fruits. The rural population, decidedly skilled in its own 

 way, is still looked down upon and held in light esteem, 

 because it has been educated upon wrong lines, aiming at 

 roundness where the hole to be filled is square. It is as 

 if you were trying to train a man for a sailor's life by giving 

 him a solicitor's education. 



In this respect Continentals understand the nature of 

 their task better than we. They impart elementary edu- 

 cation to the rural population with the same care as to 

 the urban, but they impart it on different lines, in a rural 

 way. In Denmark — in some respects the master country 

 for Agriculture — whose peasantry, in Bjoernson's words, 

 is " the most enlightened in the world," education stands 

 higher in rural districts than in urban. In Switzerland, 

 in the country"^education is distinctly elementary, but it 



