arranged. They consist of the Saturday in every
week, one week at Christmas, two days at Easter,
a week at Whitsun, and a month during harvest
—making a total of nearly one quarter of the
year. The poor man's child has but five poor
years to spend in educating his mind, and
one-fourth of that time is wasted. These frequent
and long vacations empty the brain, and
destroy habits of obedience and subordination.
Those who know how little school or college
learning a gentleman's son ordinarily retains
after three years' college and ten years' school,
will understand how much less must be
retained by a country boy who goes to school at
five and leaves at nine or ten. The open air soon
washes all stains of the school ink off his mind.
Intent on driving horses, and making the ploughshare
cleave straight and evenly, Hodge soon
forgets all school lore but a little bungling reading,
too painful and slow to render even the beer-shop
penny paper edifying. He remembers, from
practice, one or two arithmetical rules; from the
Sunday service, several Bible stories, and two
or three religious truths. He may be able,
when he marries, by strong steermanship and
much sympathetic movement of the mouth, to
laboriously write his name, in characters like the
teeth of an ill-kept saw. His poetry, texts,
geography, dictation, and grammar, vanish into
air.

He is like a tame parrot that has escaped and
flown back to the woods; he abandons his tunes
and resumes his natural uncouth scream. He
does not want to learn the size of the moon,
or to repeat the names of the chief rivers of
France; his mind runs on the best way of
shearing sheep, and the best sort of ointment
for foot-rots. He rises at daybreak, and goes
to bed at dark. How can he set his unused
unpliant mind to the hard task of reading?
He leaves that to "scholards." He never wants
to write, except once a year, to sister Jane in
Canada. Life, with him, is a hard dull reality,
variegated by no amusements, except at club-time
and Christmas-time; and, if he gets a holiday
at any other season, it is a day stopped out
of his wages.

In nearly every village there is a pariah family—
a family, the father of which is probably an idle
drunkard, while the mother and children are
mere beggars. The poor man, all England over,
must look forward, unless Providence specially
interpose, to pass his old age in the workhouse;
but these pariahs are born in the workhouse, and
retire to it at certain seasons, just as regularly
as the squire's family go to town in the winter.
The father sots all day at the public-house,
or spends a quiet evening at home beating
his wife. The children mope about the hedges,
stealing wood and robbing nests. The boys
grow up poachers, and the girls go on the parish.
The family began ill and will end ill. It is such
families that fill the jails, feed the gallows, and
contribute inmates to the hulks, the solitary
cells, and the hospitals. The father of such a
family will never send his children to school,
unless compelled. Because he does not send
them where they could benefit by good
example, and learn the sin and baseness of
idleness, lying and stealing, the children grow up
to perpetuate the race of jail-birds, and become
the burden, the vexation, and the shame, of the
county.

Such men do not, and will not, send their
children to school. They are generally brutal
dogged creatures, who hate the clergyman
because he reproves them, and the country gentlemen
who punish them and chide them. They
know nothing, and don't wish their children
to be wiser than themselves. They don't want
their sons to grow up sober men, to lecture
them on drunkenness, and to disregard them as
companions. They don't go to church, because
they want "to spite the parson," and they keep
the children from school for the same reason.
It is difficult to know how to deal with such
men. They WILL bring up their children ignorant
vagabonds, and who is to stop them? This is a
free country. Some say, let us do as in Germany,
force every man, on pain of fine and imprisonment,
to educate his children. Or why do not
the country squires see to it? They have a
thousand means of mild compulsion. They could
make their bailiffs insist on their labourers and
tenants sending their children to school, and
keeping them there, when they have once begun
to send them. Unfortunately, country gentlemen,
at the covert side and in the hunting-field,
sometimes forget the sufferings of the poor,
their pinching poverty, their dull monotonous
life, nay, even their just claims. Too many of
them sneer and tell you, over their wine, that
education only makes poor people restless and
discontented with their condition in life; that learning
writing encourages forgery, and that reading
makes men idle, and fills their minds with
mistaken notions. You would really think, to hear
these comfortable rich men, that millionnaires
were a peculiar hereditary class, set apart by
Divine command to enjoy all the pleasures of the
world, and that the poor were a set of creatures
destined, like the moles, to obscure and
unrewarded toil.

The greatest deficiency in village schools is
the want of sufficient teachers. Look at our
school at Pipeton—and I select it because it
presents a low average—with one young
mistress to keep in order and educate thirty-six
children, five or six hours a day. One pair of
eyes, one brain, one pair of hands, cannot do it.
Why, in Olive Tree Academy, Turnham-green,
the thirty boys pass through the hands of at least
four masters every day. The village schoolmaster
has too much to do, and by the time he
has preserved discipline, has no time left to teach.
To at least every twenty children there should be
a pupil-teacher; and parishes, according to rental,
should be taxed to support these improvements
of their own schools, which, on the voluntary
system, are apt to be starved and stunted, or the