Education and Amusements of the Lower Classes. 125 



Havre, for the Paris market and for Brighton : but it is also 

 cultivated at Havre and at Dieppe ; and by M. Racine, who 

 showed us his melon-ground, and furnished us with an out- 

 line of the culture, as practised at Honfleur, which we shall 

 give in our next Number. 



{^To be continued.) 



Art. II. Remarks on the Education a7id Amusements of the Lotuer 

 Classes. By WilliaiM Spence, Esq. F.L.S. 



Sir, 

 As the general education of the lower classes, in which like 

 yourself I take a deep interest, is closely connected with that 

 of gardeners, and is, besides, a branch of that " domestic im- 

 provement " which the title of your valuable Magazine em- 

 braces, perhaps you will allow me to occupy one or two of its 

 pages, in stating that all my observations, in my various tours 

 in the south of Germany, fully confirm your opinion, expressed 

 in recent Numbers of the Gardener's Magazine and Magazine 

 of Natural History, as to the decided superiority of the Ger- 

 man peasantry over the same class in England, in civility, 

 information, morality, and, I may add, independence of cha- 

 racter. Common labourers in Germany have repeatedly re- 

 fused the money which I offered them, after asking questions 

 respecting their occupation, or after they had rendered little 

 services, such as putting to rights the traces of our carriage, 

 &c. This never happened to me in England, and I am afraid, 

 with Mr. Touchwood, would not now in Scotland, whatever 

 might have been his experience there, on this point, forty years 

 before his visit to Marchthorn and St. Ronan's Well. Every 

 one, too, must agree with you, that this inferiority on our 

 side (for a striking fact in proof of which, I refer your readers 

 to a note I send you herewith, on the public garden at Frank- 

 fort for your Foreign Notices), so painfully mortifying to the 

 English observer, is to be rectified only by the general and 

 improved education of our lower classes ; to which, if the one 

 hundredth part of our money had been devoted, that has been 

 wasted on objects of infinitely less importance, the British 

 empire might have now been a perfect paradise. Much may 

 yet be done ; but it is clear that the education wanted is not 

 the humdrum system of our ordinary village schools, which is 

 a mere waste of time, but such a combination of the best parts 

 of the plans of Bell and Lancaster, Festalozzi and Fellenberg, 



