in ten, or one in forty. It is, therefore, manifest, that if not in respect of the whole, yet, in many parts, of the proper means there is deplorable destitution.

It is a subject of debate, Whether the provisions of education are more ample in municipal, or in rural, districts? The data are very limited and insufficient. It need not have been inflamed with any party animosity. But the needless assaults made upon the character of the manufacturing districts has awakened a reprisal of argument, and, perhaps, of invective, very prejudicial to cool discussion. We would endeavour to poise the scales. We seek but even-handed award.

Now there are towns and cities which cannot be called manufacturing. They are ports, and either higher or lower capitals. Bristol and Westminster and York, may be adduced for examples. In the first there are 512 day and evening schools, and 86 Sunday schools, making a total of 598 schools. The number of scholars is 21,865. The population is 130,000. This but returns seventeen per cent. of the inhabitants as under instruction. But in some of its suburbs, it is not as four to the hundred.Westminster is a royal, a legislative, an ecclesiastical, a martial, metropolis. There sleeps the dust of our most illustrious dead. There are all the great Officers of State and Departments of Government. In five of its most extensive parishes, daily

in every five two-fifths, is enrolled in Sabbath schools. And these were the returns made in times, and collected from scenes, of unprecedented distress. The state of clothing always forms a most important condition of attendance. Also, much of this education is paid for by the poor themselves, who have for these four years obtained, with difficulty, and greatly through charity, a bare subsistence. No expense is sooner curtailed in affluent families, in seasons of pressure which must be felt by all, than that required in the tuition of children. We might expect that among the poor, the reduction would be very great. And yet how much smaller is it than we might have supposed that it must prove! Is not this a most gratifying census?

We may now survey the agrestian population. The very term, we have already found, was used by the Latins in the sense of the rude. Rusticus was a sort of correlate. Paganus meant simply a villager; but as villages were less likely to receive knowledge than towns, it became a word to denote ignorance; and as towns received Christianity before the villages, those who remained idolaters were called Pagans. There is no argument in the variations of such etymologies against this class. Its moods of mind, its means of information, may have entirely changed. Many arguments are inapposite. Taking, for instance, crime as the general accompaniment, if not the fruit, of ignorance, we

might look to the commitments from different manufacturing and agricultural counties. During the last seven years these have greatly increased. Now were we told that they had doubled in Yorkshire and Lancashire, though two Ridings of the one, and though the higher sides and acute angle opposite the base of the other, are really agricultural,-it would lie as the probable charge against the evil influence of the manufacturing system. But the same holds true,—the commitments have, during this period of seven years, doubled,-in Rutland and Westmoreland. Such contrary evidence is not, therefore, availing on either side. Yet, as it applies to Cheshire, Staffordshire, and Shropshire, as well as to Monmouth, which, as a great mining county, points another way, it is clear that it might be given a preponderance.

There is, notwithstanding, proof of greater demoralization in the agricultural districts. The number of illegitimate children in 1839, 1840, 1841, was double in Norfolk of those of the West Riding of Yorkshire they were very nearly double in Herefordshire of those of Lancashire. This is peculiarly the sign and test of low gross ignorance: and he who would make light of it, by appealing to the licentiousness of other ranks of life, fails to understand, -that, in the humbler classes, this vice can scarcely obtain very widely among the scattered population, in which homestead virtues were once supposed to find their favourite abode, without a weight of prevailing igno

rance that destroys the honour of intercourse and the sense of shame.

It is no wish on our part to disparage any labouring class. We would be the champion of all. We seek the good of all. But when certain criminations are made of one, when at its expense every other is flattered, it becomes a question of truth; and until it be determined, no healing measure can be applied. There is a volume which is entitled "Reports of Special Poor Law Commissioners on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture." It abounds with disgusting facts. Lord Ashley and Sir James Graham cannot have read it, though sitting in the Parliament to which it is addressed. One Reverend and beneficed Clergyman, the Rev. T. A. Maberley, of Cuckfield, Sussex, represents the farmers as opposed to the education of the young: he says, that he "remarks a particular deficiency in the feelings of the women as to chastity: in many instances, they seem hardly to comprehend or value it as a virtue." P. 201. Mr. Gee, of Brothertoft, near Boston, in Lincolnshire, says, "Field-work is a very bad thing for girls: forty-nine out of the fifty are seduced by it." P. 252. These pictures may be overcharged; these numbers may be exaggerated. We own ourselves incredulous. But for incomparably less flagrant corruptions, for corruptions incomparably less confirmed, have millions been denounced. Why should not the descriptions of both the forms of

labouring life be considered as the exception rather than the rule?

The inhabitant of a manufacturing town has frequent proof of the intellectual difference between the rural, and the technic, labourer. In consequence of the higher wages and increased comforts of the town, many workmen are allured from the country. If they cannot acquire the art themselves, they may obtain some employment kindred to their own; the temptation is to provide for their children. They are seen, side by side, with the native artizan. It is not invidious remark, it is overpowering fact, that they are very inferior in mental quickness and general knowledge. The great probability is that they are wholly uneducated. The contrast is almost in daily view. The question may be always arbitrated.

Innumerable examples are multiplied, throughout the breadth of our land, of the good which the more privileged classes love to do. Where is the estate of the nobleman on which abuts not the school, where is the school which he disdains to inspect, or in which his children shrink to take their part? Where is the clergyman who does not feel that his school is only less sacred than his altar? Yet this is precarious support. The system cannot overtake the range of the wide-spread population. But in our manufacturing resorts the foundation of instruction is more sure. Voluntary and generous as are those forms which we describe, it has a deeper hold.