ely the experience of a
"navvy," an engineer, a traveller, a railway director and shareholder,
and a landed proprietor in treaty with a railway company, and it is
probable that the range of images which would by turns present themselves
to his mind at the mention of the _word_ "railways," would include all
the essential facts in the existence and relations of the _thing_. Now
it is possible for the first-mentioned personage to entertain very
expanded views as to the multiplication of railways in the abstract, and
their ultimate function in civilization. He may talk of a vast network
of railways stretching over the globe, of future "lines" in Madagascar,
and elegant refreshment-rooms in the Sandwich Islands, with none the less
glibness because his distinct conceptions on the subject do not extend
beyond his one station and his indefinite length of tram-road. But it is
evident that if we want a railway to be made, or its affairs to be
managed, this man of wide views and narrow observation will not serve our
purpose.

Probably, if we could ascertain the images called up by the terms "the
people," "the masses," "the proletariat," "the peasantry," by many who
theorize on those bodies with eloquence, or who legislate without
eloquence, we should find that they indicate almost as small an amount of
concrete knowledge--that they are as far from completely representing the
complex facts summed up in the collective term, as the railway images of
our non-locomotive gentleman. How little the real characteristics of the
working-classes are known to those who are outside them, how little their
natural history has been studied, is sufficiently disclosed by our Art as
well as by our political and social theories. Where, in our picture
exhibitions, shall we find a group of true peasantry? What English
artist even attempts to rival in truthfulness such studies of popular
life as the pictures of Teniers or the ragged boys of Murillo? Even one
of the greatest painters of the pre-eminently realistic school, while, in
his picture of "The Hireling Shepherd," he gave us a landscape of
marvellous truthfulness, placed a pair of peasants in the foreground who
were not much more real than the idyllic swains and damsels of our
chimney ornaments. Only a total absence of acquaintance and sympathy
with our peasantry could give a moment's popularity to such a picture as
"Cross Purposes," where we have a peasant girl who looks as if she knew
L.