CAUSES OF DISCONTENT 17 



results from their teaching ! One of the chief, and 

 certainly the most notorious, of the difficulties of 

 British agriculture is that the people who are born in 

 rural England do not as a rule want to stay there. 

 The little learning of the schools causes them to refuse 

 corduroy in favour of the black coat. At least the 

 rural superstition is that the black coat, worn on week- 

 days, is the symbol of worldly success. In practice 

 the black coat plays a smaller part than is symbolic- 

 ally attributed to it. The boy who has spurned agri- 

 culture in order to "better himself " returns to visit 

 his native village in a tweed suit cut with geometrical 

 precision. He looks with a conscious air of superiority 

 at his contemporaries who are carting mangolds or 

 cleaning out the shippons ; and the onlooker whose 

 education happens to be more than " elementary " 

 wonders in vain whether the like of this rising youth will 

 ever be educated enough to see that carting mangolds, 

 or even mucking, is a finer occupation than serving in 

 a shop in the neighbouring town, or that corduroys are 

 really handsomer than the geometrically cut clothes. 

 Perhaps this will be recognised when agriculture gives 

 the labourer less cause to want to change his livery. 

 At present he has little or no hope of advancement. 

 The " black-coat " genuinely means something after all. 

 Elementary education, while making British youths 

 sensible of the stagnation and the hopelessness of rural 

 life, has withheld from them for the present any recog- 

 nition of its beauties. It is much higher up in the scale 

 of education that men long for the tranquillity of the 

 country, and would gladly dig a field rather than ex- 

 haust their nervous energy in the professions or in busi- 



