CHARACTER AND EDUCATION. 221 



was very short, because of the extreme urgency of begin- 

 ning the serious business of their lives rarely other 

 than farm work at the earliest possible opportunity. 

 A most interesting commentary on the condition of 

 the peasantry was made at the period under review, 

 by the Honourable and Reverend Sidney Godolphin 

 Osborne, who remarked : 



" Whilst I trace the immorality of the labouring classes 

 to defective education, the want of means to preserve 

 decency in their families, and the temptations to intemper- 

 ance which are to be found in the manner in which the 

 beer-shop keepers, unchecked by legal interference " (these 

 were the days before modern licensing laws) "offer, at every 

 hour of the day, and almost every hour of the night, all the 

 inducements likely to draw the labourer from home, and 

 to fix in him a love of drink and bad company, I trace 

 much of the crime he commits to absolute want.'' 



Nothing could be more pertinent to the position of 

 affairs at the time when the quoted remarks were 

 penned 1842 a position that had not materially 

 altered thirty years later, when the present writer made 

 his first visit of personal inquiry to the great agricul- 

 tural district named than Mr. Osborne's concluding 

 remarks. He most truthfully said : 



" Pamphlets on cottage husbandry, plans for cottage 

 building, tracts on morality, treatises on economy, have 

 been sent forth with no sparing hand ; but in nine villages 

 out of ten the cottage is still nothing but a slightly improved 

 hovel, morality is borne down by the pressure of temptation 

 on minds unfortified by education in good principles, and 

 the wages of the stoutest and most industrious scarce find 

 the coarsest food, the smallest sufficiency of fuel. In my 

 opinion, unless those above them soon determine to give 

 up some of their own luxuries, that they may give to the 

 labourer such wages as shall enable him to rear his family, 

 in comfort, in a dwelling in which decency can be preserved, 

 and within reach of a school and a church in which he and 

 his may be taught the learning fitted for their station 

 here, and tending to place them in the way to Heaven here- 

 after unless some great effort is made to obtain these 

 objects, our peasantry will become, not the support they 

 should be to the country, but a pregnant source of all that 

 can tend to subvert its best institutions." 



