II. Rough sailors must have brought the wine into the London Docks.

III. My father and his clerks must have done a great deal of arithmetical and epistolary work, before my father could have profit enough from the wine to pay for our horses, and our dinner.

IV. The tailor must have given his life to the dull business of making clothes-the wheelwright and carriage-maker to their woodwork—the smith to his buckles and springs-the postilion to his riding-the horse-breeder and breaker to the cattle in his field and stable,-before I could make progress in this pleasant manner, even for a single stage.

V. Sundry English Kings and Barons must have passed their lives in military exercises, and gone to their deaths in military practices, to provide me with my forenoons' entertainments in ruined castles; or founded the great families whose servants were to be my hosts.

VI. Vandyck and Velasquez, and many a painter before them, must have spent their lives in learning and practising their laborious businesses.

VII. Various monks and abbots must have passed their lives in pain, with fasting and prayer; and a large company of stonemasons occupied themselves in their continual service, in order to provide me, in defect of castles and noblemen's seats, with amusement in the way of abbeys and cathedrals.

How far, then, it remains to be asked, supposing my education in any wise exemplary, can all these advantages be supplied by the modern school board, to every little boy born in the prosperous England of this day? And much more in that glorious England of the future; in which there will be no abbeys, (all having been shaken down, as my own sweet Furness is fast being, by the luggage trains); no castles, except such as may have been spared to be turned into gaols, like that of "time-honoured Lancaster," also in my own neighbourhood; no parks, because Lord Derby's patent steam agriculture will have cut down all the trees; no lords, nor dukes, because modern civilization won't be Lorded over, nor Led

anywhere; no gentlemen's seats, except in the Kirby Lonsdale style; and no roads anywhere, except trams and rails? Before, however, entering into debate as to the methods of education to be adopted in these coming times, let me examine a little, in next letter, with help from my readers of aristocratic tendencies, what the real product of this olden. method of education was intended to be; and whether it was worth the cost.

For the impression on the aristocratic mind of the day was always (especially supposing I had been a squire's or a lord's son, instead of a merchant's) that such little jaunty figure, trotting in its easy chariot, was, as it were, a living diamond, without which the watch of the world could not possibly go; or even, that the diminutive darling was a kind of Almighty Providence in its first breeches, by whose tiny hands. and infant fiat the blessings of food and raiment were continually provided for God's Spanish labourers in His literal vineyard; for God's English sailors, seeing His wonders in the deep; for God's tailors' men, sitting in attitude of Chinese Josh for ever; for the divinely appointed wheelwrights, carpenters, horses and riders, hostlers and Gaius-mine-hosts, necessary to my triumphal progress; and for my nurse behind in the dickey. And it never once entered the head of any aristocratic person,- -nor would ever have entered mine, I suppose, unless I had "the most analytical mind in Europe,”—that in verity it was not I who fed my nurse, but my nurse me; and that a great part of the world had been literally put behind me as a dickey,—and all the aforesaid inhabitants of it, somehow, appointed to be nothing but my nurses: the beautiful product intended, by papa and mamma, being-a Bishop, who should graciously overlook these tribes of inferior beings, and instruct their ignorance in the way of their souls' salvation.

As the Master of the St. George's Company, I request their permission to convey their thanks to Mr. Plimsoll, for his Christian, knightly, and valiant stand, made against the recreant English Commons, on Thursday, 22nd July, 1875.

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

I HAVE thankfully received this month, from the first donor of land to the St. George's Company, Mrs. Talbot, £11 0s. 4d., rent of cottages on said land, at Barmouth, North Wales; and I have become responsible, as the Master of the Company, for rent or purchase of a room at Sheffield, in which I propose to place some books and minerals, as the germ of a museum arranged first for workers in iron, and extended into illus. tration of the natural history of the neighbourhood of Sheffield, and more especially of the geology and flora of Derbyshire. The following two letters respecting the neighbouring town of Leeds will be found interesting in connection with this first opening of St. George's work :

"LEEDS, June 21st, 1875.

"Dear Sir.-Being more or less intimately mixed up with the young of the working classes, in night schools and similar works, I am anxious to know what I can do to counteract two or three growths, which seem likely to be productive of very disastrous results, in the young men from seventeen to twenty-five, who are many of them earning from 208. to 358. per week,-the almost morbid craving for drink, and the excitement which is to be found in modern French dramas of very questionable morality, concert halls and singing rooms, where appeal is principally made to their animal passions and lusts-whose chief notion of enjoyment seems to be in getting drunk. Then the young women of similar ages, and earning from 14s. to 20s., who are in a chronic state of unrest, ever eager for novelty and sensationalism, though not quite so much given to drink as the men, yet treading a similar course. They have no pleasure in going to the country, to see flowers, birds, and fish, or to the seaside to see the sea; if there be no fireworks, no prize band, no dancing on the green, or something of the sort, they will not attempt to go. Now, where is all this to end? Nature has no charms for them; music little attraction, except in the form of dance; pictures nothing: what remains? And yet something should, and must be done, and that speedily, otherwise what will become of the poor things?

"Then, in your Elements of Drawing, you lay down certain books to be studied, etc.

"Now, suppose a woman or man has been brought up to have a kind of contempt for Grimm's Goblins, Arabian Nights, etc., as childish and frivolous.-and on account of the Calvinistic tendency of relatives, has been precluded from reading books,-how should a healthy tendency be brought about? For the mind is not a blank, to receive impressions like a child, but has all sorts of preconceived notions and prejudices in

the way,-Shakespeare looked upon as immoral, or childish, and the rest treated in an equally cavalier manner by people who probably never looked inside the books."

I should like to answer the above letter at some length; but have, to-day, no time. The sum of answer is-Nothing can be done, but what I am trying to form this St. George's Company to do. I am sorry to omit the thoughts' to which my second correspondent refers, in the opening of this following letter, but she gave me no permission to publish them:

"These thoughts made me settle in Leeds (being free from family obligations, in order to see for myself what I could do for these towns, and what their state really was. The Borough Surveyor of Leeds (who had been six months only in office, and was perhaps new to commercial life,) said to me, There is nothing in Leeds but jobbery, and trickery.' Almsgiving (for the law of supply and demand cannot do it) in the shape of decent houses, was the first thing to be done, I found.

"The late Canon Kingsley, in his tract on the Application of Associative Principles and Methods to Agriculture' (1851), confounds justice and almsgiving together. They are surely distinct,* but you cannot give alms till you have paid just debts.

"You say nothing in Fors of the custom which rules that rich capitalists and landowners shall leave each of, say five or six daughters, (I am eldest of six,) a fortune large enough to enable her to live in idleness, and more or less luxury, for life. This custom is, I believe, at the root of much extortion and avarice on the part of fathers, and leads to marriages for money on the part of younger men. I deny the claim of women to political power; but I think, with Lord Salisbury, that every girl (no matter what her rank) has a moral right to be educated for self-maintenance, and proper rational feminine self-reliance, and not mainly for society, or, in other words, for marriage.

"Believing that, in the abstract, men are morally, mentally, and physically superior to women, I yet believe that the perfect relative independence and indifferent dignity of mental attitude which rightly trained and educated women should possess before matrimony (an attitude which is, to say the least, now often wanting) is essential to the proper influence women should exercise over men. It is essential to the vantage ground on which unmarried women should stand, and from which they should draw men up to their standard, not bend themselves down to men's.

"An article (one of a series on 'French Home Life') in Blackwood, some years ago, says (nearly in these words)- Supply will follow demand if men prefer a virtuous type of womanhood, good and well; if otherwise, young ladies and their mothers will recognize the demand

* Very surely.

+ Because I entirely ignore rich capitalists and landowners, or look on them only as the claws of my Dragon.

Every unmarried woman should have enough left her by her father to keep herself, and a pet dog-but not, also, an idle man.

§ On what grounds? I don't understand a word of this paragraph: least of all why either men or women should be considered in the abstract'; and, in the concrete, I can't make out why men are the higher, at the beginning of the sentence, and women at the end of it.

and will meet it.' ! ! !

That an old-established magazine, much read by the aristocracy, should give utterance to a sentiment like this (whether or not it be true) strikes me as a sign of the times, as bad as most you have quoted in Fors. [Assuredly.]

"Apart from the élite of the women of the genuine aristocracy, who, with long inherited noble instincts of all kinds, are always charming, and full of noble influence, over those who come within its sphere,there is the vast mass of English middle-class women who make up the nation, women whose inherited instincts are perhaps ignoble, or at best indefinite. The right education of these is surely an important point in social reform, and yet is still a practically unsolved problem. I have done parish work for thirteen years and more, and know the existing relations between rich and poor experimentally. The root of the matter seems to be this. Modern Christianity professes and attempts to practise the moral code of the New Testament *-mercy, while ignoring, or trampling under foot, the moral code of the Oldjustice, which must come. It is thus that so much Christianity, in all sects, is (unconsciously often) sham Christianity. I agree with what you say of the clergy in many things; they do not know if Christianity in our days means peace, or the sword. Saying to their rich parishioners Thou art the man' would often be an ending to the peace and comfort of their own lives: subscriptions would be stopped, on which they rely for almsgiving, and by means of which almsgiving they try to draw the poor to church, and so to heaven.

"Again, who in this day has quite clean hands with regard to money? I know a clergyman who worked for many years in a parish, and improved the morality of the people by his work. Among other things, he caused (by persuasion, and substitution of a reading-room) a publichouse to be shut up-the squire co-operating with him. This selfsame squire wants to sell the property; is told it will sell better with a public-house. He rebuilds one in the village before he sells it!

"Broadly speaking, the creed of young men of the richer classes is self-indulgence, that of young women, self-sacrifice, (shown in mistaken ways, no doubt). To thinking and well-disposed women of all classes, church or chapel going is a necessity. The life of most of them is only made endurable by the hope of another world than this.

“For the past six years I have been wandering about more or less, investigating, and experiencing personally, to some extent, and at the cost of much suffering, the various forms of distress in the various classes. I look back on my years of parish work as on one long monotonous day-so hopeless is such work, unless regarded, from the ecclesiastical point of view, as a self-preparation for Heaven. Seeing, as I did, and do, how entirely preventible half of the misery is, which is coolly accepted by religious and charitable people as the ordained Will of God, I stopped short (among other reasons), and gave my mind and my time to investigate and analyse the causes of the miseries, and how far it was practicable to cut at the roots of them-not snip off the blossoms, merely. Will you bear with a word as to the position of women? I agree with you: it is a futile discussion, that of equality or inequality. But as unhappily I have had to think, see, and judge for myself, in a way that, in a right order of things, ought not to be required of a

*My dear lady, it attempts nothing of the sort. It supposes the New Testament to be an announcement of universal pardon and speedy promotion to rascals.