, it seems to me that
if Mr. Ruskin could realize in some isolated nation this idea of a
pastoral, simple existence, under a paternal government, he would have in
time an ignorant, stupid, brutal community in a great deal worse case
than the agricultural laborers of England are at present. Three-fourths
of the crime in the kingdom of Bavaria is committed in the Ultramontane
region of the Tyrol, where the conditions of popular education are about
those that Mr. Ruskin seems to regret as swept away by the present
movement in England--a stagnant state of things, in which any wind of
heaven would be a blessing, even if it were a tornado. Education of the
modern sort unsettles the peasant, renders him unfit for labor, and gives
us a half-educated idler in place of a conscientious workman. The disuse
of the apprentice system is not made good by the present system of
education, because no one learns a trade well, and the consequence is
poor work, and a sham civilization generally. There is some truth in
these complaints. But the way out is not backward, but forward. The fault
is not with education, though it may be with the kind of education. The
education must go forward; the man must not be half but wholly educated.
It is only half-knowledge like half-training in a trade that is
dangerous.

But what I wish to say is, that notwithstanding certain unfavorable
things in the condition of the English laborer and mechanic, his chance
is better in the main than it was fifty years ago. The world is a better
world for him. He has the opportunity to be more of a man. His world is
wider, and it is all open to him to go where he will. Mr. Ruskin may not
so easily find his ideal, contented peasant, but the man himself begins
to apprehend that this is a world of ideas as well as of food and
clothes, and I think, if he were consulted, he would have no desire to
return to the condition of his ancestors. In fact, the most hopeful
symptom in the condition of the English peasant is his discontent. For,
as skepticism is in one sense the handmaid of truth, discontent is the
mother of progress. The man is comparatively of little use in the world
who is contented.

There is another thought pertinent here. It is this: that no man, however
humble, can live a full life if he lives to himself alone. He is more of
a man, he lives in a higher plane of thought and of enjoyment, the more
his communications are extended with his fellows and the wider his