re varied society, and by a more diversified and
complex economic environment. While there is reason to believe that
town work is on the average less educative than country work, town
life more than turns the scale. The social intercourse of the club,
the trade society, the church, the home, the public-house, the
music-hall, the street, supply innumerable educative influences, to
say nothing of the ampler opportunities of consciously organised
intellectual education which are available in large towns. If,
however, we examine a little deeper the character of town education
and intelligence certain tolerably definite limitations show
themselves. School instruction, slightly more advanced than in the
country, is commonly utilised to sharpen industrial competition, and
to feed that sensational interest in sport and crime which absorbs the
attention of the masses in their non-working hours; it seldom forms
the foundation of an intellectual life in which knowledge and taste
are reckoned in themselves desirable. The power to read and write is
employed by the great majority of all classes in ways which evoke a
minimum of thought and wholesome feeling. Social, political, and
religious prejudices are made to do the work which should be done by
careful thought and scientific investigation.

Scattered and unrelated fragments of half-baked information form a
stock of "knowledge" with which the townsman's glib tongue enables him
to present a showy intellectual shop-front. Business smartness pays
better in the town, and the low intellectual qualities which are
contained in it are educated by town life. The knowledge of human
nature thus evoked is in no sense science, it is a mere rule-of-thumb
affair, a thin mechanical empiricism. The capable business man who is
said to understand the "world" and his fellow-men, has commonly no
knowledge of human nature in the larger sense, but merely knows from
observation how the average man of a certain limited class is likely
to act within a narrow prescribed sphere of self-seeking. Town life,
then, strongly favours the education of certain shallow forms of
intelligence. In actual attainment the townsman is somewhat more
advanced than the countryman. But the deterioration of physique which
accompanies this gain causes a weakening of mental fibre: the
potentiality of intellectual development and work which the countryman
brings with him on his entry to town life is thwarted and depressed by
the pr