, where the best that the most skilful manager can
hope for is to regulate the instruction and the discipline to suit the
average of the scholars. The best result attainable is to secure a good
amount of _schooling_: the word "education" would be quite misapplied
here.

In the village, the number of scholars would be sufficiently large to
warrant the establishment and to bear the maintenance of one good
school, with one, if not more, teachers, regularly employed, and worthy
to be called teachers rather than "school-marms." Pupils would be graded
according to their ages and acquirements, and a due use could be made of
the stimulus of competition. A real school, a real instrument of
education, would take the place of the noisy congregation of
uncontrolled boys and girls, who, in the country district-school, are
apt to acquire less of valuable learning than of the minor viciousness
that prevails among country children.

In this connection, I was forcibly struck with the announcement of a
German farmer once in my employ, whose reason for leaving me, after his
children had reached the ages of seven and eleven, to return to his
little village in Germany, was that it was impossible in this
country--and this, be it remembered, was in New England--to secure
satisfactory instruction for them. He thought that in their experience
at school here they had gained little beyond a familiarity with English,
and with a large admixture of "bad words" at that. At home they would
have, within the elementary range of a primary-school education, a
thorough training and a severe drilling which he could not hope for
here, and without which he was unwilling that they should grow up. I
have seen his village school in Germany, and the cloud of tow-headed
children who fill it; and I am prepared to believe that his preference
was not without foundation. Of course we have all the material for as
good or better schools in this country. What we need is longer terms,
better trained and educated teachers, graded classes, and better books
and appliances. These cannot be afforded in the small country
school-district. They can be had in their perfection in even a small
village; and this consideration alone, even if this were all, should be
a controlling argument in favor of village life.

But this is by no means all. Another great benefit is to be found in the
post-office near at hand, with its daily mail as an encouragement to
correspondence and to inter