progress" found him out. (It ought to be noticed here, that the
report of the Parliamentary Commission on the condition of the English
agricultural laborer does not sustain Mr. Froude's assumptions. On the
contrary, the report shows that his condition is in almost all respects
vastly better than it was fifty years ago.) Mr. Ruskin would remove the
steam-engine and all its devilish works from his vicinity; he would
abolish factories, speedy travel by rail, new-fangled instruments of
agriculture, our patent education, and remit him to his ancient
condition--tied for life to a bit of ground, which should supply all his
simple wants; his wife should weave the clothes for the family; his
children should learn nothing but the catechism and to speak the truth;
he should take his religion without question from the hearty, fox-hunting
parson, and live and die undisturbed by ideas. Now, 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 ma