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 gains of commerce, for the "large excitement" of city life, or at least for the fleshpots and the shelter from sun and rain that are incidental to existence as a town models it. To the yokel, London or New York or Melbourne is an inexhaustible romance; to the cockney of every nation, the country, except as a suburb or an ornamental farm, represents only what is repulsive in toil and uncongenial in society. Even more do the amusements of towns, the club, and the theatre, the exhibition, the race-course, and the ball, create wants that it is almost impossible to relinquish. Anciently, there were some compensations in the sweetness of village homes and the rough abundance of country life. At present, the educated person of small means, widow or school-teacher, or country surgeon's wife, who is doomed to live at a distance from a town, finds that the country is mostly tenanted by those who are too unintelligent to succeed elsewhere; and that the price of necessaries is at least as high as in the city, while the price of luxuries is greater, and many conveniences or economies, such as tram-cars and co-operative stores, and the teachers of accomplishments, are unattainable. Of course this state of things is in some respects bound to be transitory. The farmer is rapidly changing into a highly-educated man; the primary school-teacher is rising in the social grade; State inspectors and employees of the higher class are being multiplied; and railways are already carried into almost every small district in England. Still, the attractions of town-life very much overbalance those of the country even now; and the industrial reasons which urge the rising generation to throng into the metropolis, or at least into towns of some kind, are powerfully enhanced by the requirements which education and a higher re-