Page:The English Peasant.djvu/169

 In this the labourer and his master will be found of one mind. He Is not unwilling to send his children to school if you can only show him that they can earn more money by it. But if his boy can get a day's work rook-scaring, the few pence he thus earns far outweighs all the problematical advantages of a day's schooling.

It is this contempt for learning, unless it can be rapidly turned into money, which causes the agricultural labourer in Kent, notwithstanding good wages and plenty of work, to remain at the same dead level as his less prosperous countrymen. The people here, as elsewhere, are destroyed for lack of knowledge.

If we trace the life of one of these Kentish labourers, we shall see how thoroughly his material interests and those of his family are sacrificed to this faith in that apparently wise saw, Ne sutor ultra crepidam. Let us take as a type one of the better class, a waggoner, a man, we will suppose, with every advantage in character, health, and regular employment.

Commencing life by a moderately regular attendance at the national school up to seven or eight, he is, as we have seen, soon made useful as a little scarecrow. After he has been employed in odd jobs off and on for a year or two, he is entrusted with an old gun or a pistol, with which he amuses himself popping at the birds. From November till May, Sundays included, he follows this monotonous employment, unless perchance his father should volunteer to do duty for him that he may go to the Sunday School. What a vacuity of mind must result from standing about day after day in the same fields, surrounded by the same objects—objects, too, concerning which the poor lad knows nothing save their outward shapes; and such wearisome, protracted labour undergone at this tender age stunts the body as well as the mind.

If, however, he is a waggoner's son, he will soon get more congenial employment as a "mate." For a waggoner's son is carter-bred, and as used to horses as to his brothers and sisters. The atmosphere of his home is redolent of the stable. The horses are the one object of thought, of talk, and of interest to father, mother, and children. Speak to a waggoner about his team, and you have won his heart; ask the poor worn-out mother about her husband's horses, and her face will brighten up, and in the midst of her cares and hard work, she will find time to dilate on the merits of Captain,