encourage others to do the same? Will it stimulate the industry and excite the ambition of a plough-boy, to be told that if he does his work well, and is honest, and marries a wife, and brings up a family, and keeps clear of the squire's preserves, and goes occasionally to church, and does not change his master, that he may hope, at the end of half a century, to be summoned before a tableful of gentlemen, to receive from their august hands a brannew half-sovereign, to the approval and admiration of his neighbours and his grandchildren? In point of fact, the cause is a weak one, and sooner or later it must be given up. It is adhered to now with some pertinacity, as men will cling to their time-honoured hobbies and exploded schemes, and not the less rigidly when they are assailed by rude and merciless criticism. So. far as a labourer shows skill or experience in his special employment, let him be encouraged and incited by emulation and by publicity. Let the hedger, or the ploughman, or the thatcher, be brought into competition with his neighbours of the same craft, and if he can lay or trim a neater or compacter hedge; if he can put a more artistic covering upon a stack; if he can drive a furrow straighter and more uniform-give him a prize, as you would his master, or his master's landlord. But do not insult his faithful and toilsome years of service by some totally inadequate and even contemptible recompense.

We confess that there is to us something grating and unsympathetic in the general tone and demeanor of Agricultural Societies towards their labourers. They are a class which were long overlooked and trodden-down. English philanthropy is always active and always seeking for fresh and more attractive objects of compassion. It is now years since, roaming the world for new fields of enterprise, tired of alleviating the hardships of the negro abroad and the grievance of the convict at home, philanthropists caught up and set to work upon the farm labourer. And since that time he has been dragged before the world, and been set up as the patient butt for all the odd charitable shafts of reformers and theorists. All, at one time or another, experience what it is, to have friends who take too active an interest in our welfare-who have always in hand some pet plan of their own for managing our own concerns-who are always laying some well-meant traps and throwing out cords to control and check our own preferences and independent action-till their kindness becomes positively irritating and their bonds galling, and the victim breaks loose and finds relief in coldness and absence. If ever a hedger and ditcher occupies his solitary hours in analysing his feelings, he must be sometimes driven to the conclusion that he is overwhelmed by the goodness of his well-wishers and patrons. There are two

extreme points of view from which the labourer is regarded at the present day-and, like other extravagant notions, either has some faint resemblance to the true conception which it exaggerates; but both will be resented by all who live in rural parishes, and who have been brought into contact with the minds of those who form the bulk of rural congregations, and who are conversant with rural manners and customs. One of these surrounds him with a poetical atmosphere-fancying freedom from care, and frugal contentment, and a toil-less routine of genial occupation, and ceaseless whistling, to be the normal and inalienable conditions of his life. It concludes that because some of his duties are light and pretty, and because now and then he is lighthearted-because a plough-boy is never tired of giving out a couple of bars of a popular air the whole morning he is driving his team; and because a group of men and women listlessly tossing about fresh-mown grass on a July afternoon, or the three or four generations of an entire village sitting in rows over their huge baskets in a hop-garden in September, is a picturesque scene-therefore, every operation of rustic labour is romantic, and has an exhilarating effect upon the spirits of every man, woman, and child so occupied. This view, though ideal and unreal, is harmless enough. The other, which is a rebound from and a protest against this, is not a whit more in accordance with facts or nature, and is more positively harmful. It represents the Agricultural peasantry as a race wanting in all fine instincts, and with brutish habits, and stolid, and emotionless, and immoral. It pretends to offer a rational, matter-of-fact account of them, and to scatter the haze of poetry through which men have been taught to look at them. What can you expect the social condition of a family to be, who maintain, without sympathy or support, a struggling fight against starvation upon nine or ten shillings a-week, eked out by the miserable pittance which the mother or boys are able to add at rare intervals to the common scanty stock, and living in a wretched hovel, huddled together day and night in two or, at the most, three rooms, in contempt of all cleanliness, decency, and morality? What can you expect the intellectual condition of a man to be, whose home, when he reaches it after his day's work is done, is so uninviting, and whose mind has been intent upon the clods which, from the sunrise almost till the winter evening closes in, his plough has been turning up; whose nature is debased by unvarying contact with heavy irrational animals, and by the filthy and gross occupations which his daily duties expose him to? What opportunity can a man's frame have for physical health and development, whose work drives him out into the open air on all days and at all seasons, exposed with the thinnest amount of

and we

clothing, and with few of those powers of resistance which plentiful and nourishing food supply to the system, to the extremes of heat and cold and wet, and the onslaughts of rheumatism and low fever? The man whose ways of life are such, and whose forefathers for generations back have passed through the same circumstances, can be little better than a hind or a serf; and if we wish to reclaim and to raise him, we must treat him as such, and proceed with our experiments accordingly. Now, against this view, which is only too general-though it contains some elements of truth-we emphatically protest. It is specious and plausible, and wears an appearance of unqualified candour. Like many other common-sense accounts of a thing, as they are called, it is exaggerated and one-sided. It suppresses all extenuating or refining conditions, and after all jumps at a conclusion which the premises do not warrant. To us utter what we believe must be the opinion of all whose position or duty has placed them in the country-the English peasant, though his life has little enough of the romance with which many would invest it, has a very different aspect to that presented of him above. We do not deny that he undergoes much misery in his career. A labourer at fifty has done an amount of work, and has submitted to privations and hardships which would have laid low a less robust and accommodating constitution. He has few comforts, mental or material, to cheer his declining years. His life may close in the Union, or its end may be hastened by poverty, or by the development of any one of those numerous ills of which a life-long exposure has accumulated the seeds in his body. He leaves no successes nor triumphs behind him; he lives and he dies as his father lived and died before him, and he has no reasonable hope that his son will do otherwise after him. What we call prosperity has never shined upon his labours. Day after day, from morning till night, he has had to stand up and fight the hard battle of bare existence; and what wonder if, when he succumbs at last, his frame is battered, and his spirit broken, and the spark of his intellect burns dimly and faint. What wonder if enterprise and ambition have never entered into the narrow circle of his ideas, and that his thoughts have seldom ranged beyond the unvarying present. Shall we call him clownish and stolid, and speak slightingly of his faithful plodding industry? Was not his mission in the world to work with his hands? And has he not worked till those hands drop nerveless at his side, and that body is bent double? What wonder that a taste for refinement, and that restless longing to push upward, from which few are free, have found no place in his dull hard existence. The poetry of Nature has no voice for him. His hands handle her soil, and

his home is in her fields, and his lot is to be her fellow-worker; but for him her face is lighted up by no smiles, her aspect wears no ever-changing lines and hues of beauty, she stirs no deep unaccountable emotions of his heart; she is only to him a constant monitor of his pressing need to work, and ever to work. And is there nothing to respect and admire? is there no worth, no submissive contentment-ay, and no dignity, no piety-in his interminable work? Call it, if you will, a dull, poor-spirited, wearisome lot; but, because he has bowed to his lot, and laboriously plods along his inevitable track, do not cast a slur upon his honest industry, and brand him grovelling and brutish. It is a lot which brings compensations with it, which those outside his sphere little dream of. His imagination, it may be, is feeble and dormant-it may strike no poetry out of the scenes he is daily moving amongst. But, unconsciously to himself, the calm influences of Nature in her homely material aspect, and the necessity of incessant occupation, create in him a placid contentment, which to the restless busy world above him may seem sluggish and inert, but which guards his life from the irritation and the excitement, the ceaseless rivalry and the exhausting wear and tear, which a more striving career involves. The mysterious properties of air and soil, and the marvellous processes of reproduction, are secrets whose existence is hardly suspected by him; but he works on in simple trust, confiding not in science, nor in a chain of efficient causes, but in unfailing experience. Thus his work becomes a part of himself, it assumes a prominence among the facts of his existence, and enters indissolubly into his duty and religion. He is no machine, no slave chained down to a mechanical routine. Dreary and saddening may be his endless work, but he is able to stamp it in a degree with his own character, and make it bear the impress of his own way of doing it. Men are ready enough to sing the praises and court the favour of those who carve out great fortunes, or force their way upward in society; but no notice is too contemptuous for those whose life has slipped away, steadfastly doing their duty to God and man in the position in which they were placed. Yet the often-heard boast of a village patriarch-For five-and-forty years I worked on that farm, even since I was no higher than my hand'-carries with it as true a pathos, and is founded on grounds as just, as the complacent self-congratulation of any whose ambition in the world has been ever to rise. The old labourer's ideas, and perhaps experience, never revolved beyond the bounds of that secluded hamlet. There he was born; in that cottage his life has glided away; and in that quiet churchyard he hopes his body will

rest.

But what a tale does that half-century of peaceful and

uneventful toil unfold! What an amount of solid labour, what patience, what industry, what physical exhaustion, what an expenditure of vital forces and animal strength, since the day when he first learnt to crack his whip, and tyrannize with youthful audacity over his huge, docile plough-team, till the time when his last day's work is done-his last furrow turned, his last sward mown-and he is laid by, to retain for a little longer his feeble hold upon life, in the nook by his cottage fire! Few can look back upon their career with less of regret or bitterness. The fight, it may be, was a cruel one while it lasted; but when he can work no more-when his hard destiny is at length appeased-there is a softness and almost child-like gentleness and simplicity comes over the aged peasant who has worn away his life in daily labour. The scenes of his lifelong struggle become hallowed with affections of which he was never conscious when, in the thoughtlessness of youth or in the vigour of manhood, he was toiling amongst them from morning till night. Then, when he was earning the frugal means of his own and his family's existence, with the sweat of his brow and the labour of his hands, his mind had no room for more tender feelings; but now, when his hands are powerless, and the sap of his strength dried up, associations unthought-of before rise up, and bind the well-remembered fields, the woods, the lanes, the crops, the seasons, the very animals and implements, by ties which to him are dear and sacred. The ties which bind us to the soil, and make our affections cling around some few bits of the earth's surface, are rooted as deeply in his nature. The old feudal attachment of the peasant to the soil, however much changes of time and circumstances may have weakened it, and however utterly it is ignored by the present age, has not yet lost its influence and died out. And long may it continue. What are the corresponding duties of the soil and the lords of the soil to the labourer, it is not our purpose now to inquire. The centralizing and systematizing habit of the day, with its disregard of local customs, and its contempt for irregular, undefined associations, tends to loosen this attachment. It tends to shake the old established order of agricultural society, to spread a notion of factious and capricious independence, to make the labourer dissatisfied with his condition, and to set before him as the first duty of man to strive to rise out of it.

In

It is the duty of all who take an interest in the well-being of every class of the Agricultural population, to watch the operation of the various schemes set in motion for the purpose. great social and mental reformations, all thoughtful men will endeavour to direct, not to check, the progress of opinion. The infusion of new false principles is a danger more to be guarded