actual homes outside city precincts, and also for the disinclination of most men to change their careers and habits suddenly. The exodus to towns takes place very much through the young, who have come to think that their best chances of employment and enjoyment are great cities, and whom their elders do not care to dissuade, and do not like to keep back from what seems certain gain.[1]
There is, however, another very potent cause that is contributing to build up towns. Every great country has established State schools, and made education of some kind compulsory. The instruction given is in no case very profound or far-reaching. It is generally more or less confined to reading, writing, and arithmetic, with so much knowledge of geography and of the national history and literature as can be given in popular text-books. Still, what difference there is between the primary education of our own days and the "sound commercial education" of a few years back is rather to the advantage of the primary State school, which professes to teach a little less, but, as a rule, teaches what it does thoroughly and expeditiously. Accordingly, the children of the poorest classes in all English-speaking countries, and in parts of the Continent, have been raised in one important respect to the level of a higher class, have acquired its tastes and ambitions, and are able to compete with it in commerce. Naturally, the cleverest boys of the village school do not care to remain plough-boys; they yearn for the speculative
- ↑ Dr. Ogle, who has made the question a study, takes this view. "The decline was brought about by the migration of young people, mainly under twenty-five years of age, from the rural to the manufacturing districts, and of young men in greater proportion than young women."—"Ogle on the alleged depopulation of the rural districts in England," Statistical Journal, vol. iii. p. 231.
