LABOUR. 287 



the inappropriateness of town methods to country Kfe 

 in the matter of elementary education. None of those 

 familiar with the conditions of rural life can be satisfied 

 with the results of a S3^stem of education which, modelled 

 on that given in towns, fits the upgr owing children of country 

 folk possibly for clerkships, shop-assistantships and the 

 like, in fact for anything rather than for agricultural occupa- 

 tion, and so naturally predisposes country folk to think 

 of town employment and to migrate into towns. We have 

 not even taken a leaf out of the United States' book 

 in making lessons on agricultural subjects common in 

 rural elementary schools, much less have we sought to 

 give our rural schooling a distinctly rural tone. In fact, 

 in Mr. Prothero's words, " unfortunately, for the children 

 of agricultural labourers little or nothing is done which 

 does not unfit them for their fathers' industry." 



Without question our Education for labourers wants 

 tuning up, and that considerably, upon more points than 

 one, and in quite a new sense. The subject has been 

 generally discussed under the head of " Education." But 

 it bears a special aspect as applying specifically to Labour. 

 What our educational authorities seem, let us say, not quite 

 fully to realise, is this, that classes grow as well as indivi- 

 duals. Whether our rural system of education was in former 

 times fully suited to the class and conditions of rural 

 labourers, it is bootless now to inquire into. But in spite 

 of persistent neglect — and more than neglect, that is, social 

 and economic pressing backward — the class which supplies 

 our agricultural labourers has grown in its mentality and 

 its aspirations. It wants different food set before it to-day, 

 food suggestive of further knowledge, of a destiny to rise 

 to higher things, among other such, to independence. The 

 blank created by what actually exists is rendered all the 

 more perceptible and painful by the sight of what is going 

 on around. Our general system of Education is not all 

 that it might l)o. We acknowledge that in earnestly trying 

 to improve it. But it has advanced upon what used to 

 exist. And being so, it has produced better results. And 

 rural folk observe those results and detect the cause. They 



