ental tranquillity
for viewing life largely. But leisure is not all. They need, further, an
education to enable them to form an outlook fit for themselves; for
nobody else can provide them with such an outlook. The middle-classes
certainly are not qualified to be their teachers. It may be said at once
that the attempts of working-women here and there to emulate women of
the idle classes are of no use to themselves and reflect small credit on
those they imitate. In this connection some very curious things--the
product of leisure and no outlook--are to be seen in the village. That
objectionable yet funny cult of "superiority," upon which the "resident"
ladies of the valley spend so much emotion, if not much thought, has its
disciples in the cottages; and now and then the prosperous wife or
daughter of some artisan or other gives herself airs, and does not
"know," or will not "mix with," the wives and daughters of mere
labourers in the neighbouring cottages. Whether women of this aspiring
type find their reward, or mere bitterness, in the patronage of still
higher women who are intimate with the clergy is more than I can say.
The aspiration has nothing to do with that "religion," that new ethic,
which I have just claimed to be the thing ultimately needed, before the
loss of the peasant system can be made up to the women.

XVIII

THE WANT OF BOOK-LEARNING

Some light was thrown on the more specific needs of the village by an
experiment in which I had a share from ten to thirteen years ago. The
absence of any reasonable pastime for the younger people suggested it.
At night one saw boys and young men loafing and shivering under the lamp
outside the public-house doors, or in the glimmer that shone across the
road from the windows of the one or two village shops. They had nothing
to do there but to stand where they could just see one another and try
to be witty at one another's expense, or at the expense of any
passers-by--especially of women--who might be considered safe game: that
was their only way of spending the evenings and at the same time
enjoying a little human companionship. True, the County Council had
lately instituted evening classes for "technical education" in the
elementary schools; but these classes were of no very attractive nature,
and at best they occupied only two evenings a week. As many as twenty or
five-and-twenty youths, however, attended them, glad of the warmth and
light, though bored by th