ms that appeared to him of an essentially ugly
kind, as the herding of human beings into cities, the din and dirt of
factories, the millions of lives that were lived under almost servile
conditions; and so much of that sad labour was directed to wrong ends,
to aggrandisement, to personal luxury, to increasing the comfort of
oligarchies. The simple life of the countryside seemed a better ideal,
and yet the lot of the rustic day-labourer was both dull and hard. It
looked sweet enough on a day of high summer, such as this, when a man
need ask for nothing to better than to be taken and kept out of doors;
but the thought of the farm-hand rising in a cheerless wintry dawn,
putting on his foul and stiffened habiliments, setting out in a chilly
drizzle to uproot a turnip-field, row by row, with no one to talk to
and nothing to look forward to but an evening in a tiny
cottage-kitchen, full of noisy children--no one could say that this was
an ideal life, and he did not wonder that the young men flocked to the
towns, where there was at all events some stir, some amusement. That
was the dark side of popular education, of easy communications, of
newspapers, that it made men discontented with quiet life, without
supplying them with intellectual resources.

Yet with all its disadvantages and discomforts, Hugh could not help
feeling that the life of the country was more wholesome and natural for
the majority of men, and he wished that the education given in country
districts could be directed more to awakening an interest in country
things, in trees and birds and flowers, and more, too, to increasing
the resources of boys and girls, so that they could find amusing
occupation for the long evenings of enforced leisure. The present
system of education was directed, Hugh felt, more to training a
generation of clerks, than to implanting an aptitude for innocent
recreation and sensible amusement. People talked a good deal about
tempting men back to the land, but did they not perceive that, to do
that, it was necessary to make the agricultural life more attractive?
It was a mistake that ran through the whole of modern education, that
the system was invented by intellectual theorists and not by practical
philosophers. The only real aim ought to be to teach people how to
enjoy their work, by making them efficient, and to enjoy their leisure,
by arousing the imagination.

Hugh's musings led him on to wonder how it was possible to cultivat