ght do much good. They might be attached to the new schools
now building throughout the country. The labourer, from so long living
upon coarse, ill-cooked food, acquires an artificial taste. Some men eat
their bacon raw; others will drink large quantities of vinegar, and well
they may need it to correct by its acidity the effects of strong
unwholesome cabbage. The cottage cook has no idea of those nutritious
and pleasant soups which can be made to form so important a feature in
the economy of daily life.

The labourer is in a lower degree of the same class as the third-rate
working farmer of the past. He is the old small dairy farmer in a
coarser shape. With a little less education, ruder manners, with the
instincts of eating, drinking, and avarice more prominently displayed,
he presents in his actual condition at this day a striking analogy to
the agriculturist of a bygone time. In fact, those farmers of twenty or
thirty acres, living in cottage-like homesteads, were barely
distinguishable as far as _personnel_ went from the labourers among whom
they lived. This being the case, it is not surprising to find that the
labourer of this day presents in general characteristics a marked
affinity in ideas and sentiments to those entertained by the old
farmer. He has the same paternal creed in a more primeval form. He
considers his children as his absolute property. He rules them with a
rod of iron, or rather of ground-ash. In fact, the ground-ash stick is
his social religion. The agricultural labouring poor are very rough and
even brutal towards their children. Not that they are without affection
towards them, but they are used to thrash them into obedience instead of
leading them into it by the gentle means of moral persuasion.

Bystanders would call the agricultural labourer cruel. Carters, for
instance, had till lately a habit of knocking the boys under their
control about in a brutal manner. But I do not think that in the mass of
cases it arose from deliberate cruelty, but from a species of stolid
indifference or insensibility to suffering. Somehow they do not seem to
understand that others suffer, whether this arises from the rough life
they lead, the endless battle with the weather, the hard fare--whether
it has grown up out of the circumstances surrounding them. The same
unfeeling brutality often extends to the cattle under their care. In
this there has been a decided improvement of late years; but it is not
yet extinc