Page:The English Peasant.djvu/144

 All these things combine to depress a naturally sensitive people, and to render them the victims of oppression both earthly and spiritual.

Education helps them to throw off the yoke, and every clever lad naturally thinks of emigration as the only possible cure for the terrible hardships he must endure if he stays at home. As a poor mother said, "They like to be good scholars, because it helps them to get away."

Education, too, frees their minds from still darker evils which oppress them—belief in omens, witchcraft, ghosts, etc.

"The Church an' Happy Zunday" would doubtless be very popular if it were written in ordinary English. It teaches the labouring man that—

Sunday gives the poor toiler an opportunity of cultivating those human affections without which life would become bestial. It is—

the only day when families and friends can meet. Thus one of the poems describes a truly rural custom, that of bringing one another home on Sunday evening:—

The Dorset peasant's faith in God is simple and childlike—God has promised, and He will perform. So, too, he forgets not the dead, but, with faith in a future life, he says—