atest difficulties he has to contend against is the necessity of
providing education. Where is a farmer, living perhaps two or three
miles, often enough four and six miles, from a town, to send his boys to
school? The upper class of agriculturists can, of course, afford to have
a proper governess at home till they are old enough, and then send them
to one of the so-called middle-class schools. The lower class, on the
other hand, who do not aspire very high, and whose ideas are little more
ambitious than those of their labourers, are contented with the school
in the neighbouring village. Till recently these village schools were
very poor affairs, something a little better than the old dame school,
but not much. But since the new Education Act the lower class of farmers
are in a better position with respect to education than those who
possess much higher claims to social distinction. Where there is not a
school board, the clergyman and the landowners have combined, and built
first-rate schools, up to all the requirements of the Act, and attended
by properly certified teachers. The lower class farmer, who is troubled
with no scruples about the association of his boys with the labourers'
children, can send them to this school at a very low charge indeed, and
they will there receive a good foundation. But the middle-class
farmer--the man who is neither an independent gentleman, nor obliged to
live on bacon and greens--is unprovided for, and yet this class is the
most numerous. They have better views for their sons than to confine
those early impressions upon which so much depends to the narrow and
rude, if not coarse manners of the labourers' children. They look higher
than that, and they are fully justified in doing so. They do not,
therefore, at all relish the idea of sending their boys to the national
school of the parish, let it be never so well supplied with teachers.
There is another objection to it. It has a faint suspicion of the
pauper. Now if there is anything a downright English yeoman abominates
more than all the rest it is any approach to the "parish." This is a
"parish" school. It is not a paupers' school--that is admitted--but it
is a "parish" school, to which the children of men who have often
received relief are sent. The yeoman's instinct revolts at it. Attempts
have been made to get over this niceness of feeling by erecting a
special class-room for farmers' sons, and patriotic baronets have even
gone so far