not defending the country folk of East Kent. Facts are stubborn, and it is my present business to state them as I remember.
On the evening in question, my father was the reader at the village penny reading. So the silly old gentleman, as the leading resident, was asked to take the chair. I see him now as though it were yesterday, rising at the close of the meeting, hemming and hawing: “The vicar — he asked me — to thank him — for his great kindness — in so ably entertaining us — and amusing us — this evening.” He then had gained his sea legs, and ended quite fluently: “And so, in response to his request, I ask you to join me in thanking him for this magnificent entertainment.” On the whole, what he said was the mere truth. But it illustrates how necessary is a decent reserve in the ceremonial of social life.
The penny readings were the first faint signs of a revolution in English culture. Its accomplishment took about fifty years. The England of the eighteenth century and of the main part of the nineteenth century consisted of a highly educated upper class composed of landowners, leaders in business and commetce, and professional men. But the great mass of manual labourets, of artisans, and of the lower end of the traders, were very deficiently educated, if at all. After the middle of the century, and more especially after the first move toward democracy in 1868, the education of the whole nation was seriously initiated. “Let us educate our masters!” exclaimed a leading statesman in a speech in the House of Commons when the plunge had been taken. Of course the movement was slow in getting under way, and still slower in producing any visible effect. But now, looking across fifty or sixty years of conscious recollection, I can see that schools and universities have produced an entirely new type of Englishman, so far as concerns the mass of people.
The standard comments on English education of the earlier period were contained in the Essays of Matthew Arnold. At the time when he wrote they were true enough. But nothing in his Essays applies to the England of to-day. It is still fashionable for superior persons in England to quote him as though his criticisms still applied. But these superior persons are engrossed in reading literature and often have scanty knowledge of the immediate facts around them. One of my most precious memories is that I have, within the space of my lifetime, witnessed the education of England, and the change in English lives that that education has meant.
V
The old bobbin man, as he journeyed with his horse and wagon slowly from the woods near Canterbury to the North Foreland at the tip of Kent, passed through scenes of English History unthinkingly and unknowingly. There still remain in England individuals of his mental grade. But as a type he has vanished from the land. The gap in education between classes has
