s a sort of benevolent tyranny, whose
constitution is no concern of theirs. Commons or Lords, Liberals or
Tories--what does it matter to the labourer which of them has the power,
so long as one or other will cast an occasional look in his direction,
and try to do something or other to help him? What they should do rests
with the politicians: it is their part to suggest, the labourer's to
acquiesce.

Such are some of the more obvious disabilities from which the cottage
people suffer, largely for want of book-learning. I think, however, that
they are beginning to be aware of the disadvantage, for, though they say
little about it, I have heard of several men getting their children to
teach them, in the evening, the lessons learnt at school during the day.
Certainly the old contempt for "book-learning" is dying out. And now and
then one hears the most ingenuous confessions of incompetence to
understand matters of admitted interest. An old woman, discussing
"Tariff Reform," said: "We sort o' people can't understand it for
ourselves. What we wants is for somebody to come and explain it to us.
And then," she added, "we dunno whether we dares believe what they
says." If you could hear one even of the better-taught labourers trying
to read out something from a newspaper, you would appreciate his
difficulties. He goes too slowly to get the sense; the end of a
paragraph is too far off from the beginning of it; the thread of the
argument is lost sight of. An allusion, a metaphor, a parenthesis, may
easily make nonsense of the whole thing to a reader who has never heard
of the subject alluded to, or of the images called up by the metaphor,
and whose mind is unaccustomed to those actions of pausing
circumspection which a parenthesis demands.

XIX

EMOTIONAL STARVATION

Remembering the tales which get into the papers now and then of riot
amongst the "high-spirited young gentlemen" at the Universities, I am a
little unwilling to say more about the unruliness of our village youths,
as though it were something peculiar to their rank of life. Yet it must
not be quite passed over. To be sure, not all the village lads, any more
than all undergraduates, are turbulent and mischievous; yet here, as at
Oxford, there is a minority who apparently think it manly to be
insubordinate and to give trouble, while here, just as there, the better
sense of the majority is too feeble to make up a public opinion which
the offenders would be afr