178 BRITISH RURAL LIFE AND LABOUR. 



over the land in remote and outlying districts, away from 

 the hum of busy city life, this population had lived and 

 toiled almost, as it were, in a world apart, and under a 

 system which was nothing better than a relic of feudal 

 times. The English peasant was the victim of this system. 

 Ignorant, isolated, helpless, he would never, perhaps, 

 unaided, have ventured to lift up his head. Generation 

 after generation were born to the same life of cheerless toil, 

 alternated by no warm ray of hope or ambition. Children 

 of tender years were sent out into the fields to earn a few 

 pence, to help to keep the hungry wolf, whose name is 

 STARVATION, from the squalid ' cottage,' that, damp and 

 unhealthy though it was, served, with its mud walls, and 

 its mockingly ' picturesque ' exterior, to hide from the 

 passer-by the terrible poverty and suffering that were 

 borne with so touchingly- patient an endurance by its 

 inmates. Helpless ignorance, social and physical degrada- 

 tion, wretchedness and squalor such were the results of 

 our agricultural system, so far as the labourer was con- 

 cerned. But times, happily, have changed. Substantial 

 advance has been made beyond the barrier which, at one 

 time, seemed to shut up the English peasant in a state of 

 hopeless misery ; and he now looks out upon the expanse 

 of a larger world, with bright hopes of further progress 

 from the point he has already reached. Burning lights 

 have searched the dark corners of our island, and industry 

 and commerce from other fields have offered a helping hand 

 to the tiller of the soil. In the western counties the peasant's 

 frame is still enfeebled, and his movements are slow, from 

 the effect of years of semi-starvation. But this is a con- 

 stitutional condition, which will disappear when better 

 wages have induced a larger consumption of animal food. 

 The rising generation will be freer from this taint the taint 

 of misery ; and each succeeding race under brighter 

 circumstances will be stronger and better than its fore- 

 runners. Agriculture, in this country, has by no means 

 reached its maximum limit of excellence. There is room 

 for a great advance. It is natural to suppose that the 

 inertia, which affected the labourer a few years since, should 

 have also affected the farmer. The peasant has shaken 

 himself, to a great extent, free from the influence of this 

 inertia, and his emancipation has given a shock to the 

 agriculturist from which the latter has not even yet re- 

 covered, and the effect of which has had very much, we 

 believe, to do with the recent ' depression.' So much for 

 the material phase of the peasant's condition. Education, 

 as we all recognise, does not consist in mere book know- 

 ledge.' But whilst the present generation of peasant 

 children have secured, and are continuing to secure, more of 

 this species of acquirement than any previous generation, 

 their parents, although in some cases unable to read, are 

 nevertheless better instructed, both socially and politically, 



