I repeat, it can only be by such means that the farmer can pay more for manual labour. Active hands, directed by superior intelligence, already obtain money wages above the mean of 16s.; and as there is greater scope in agriculture for the exercise of judgment than perhaps in any other trade or pursuit, in which physical labour forms so great an element, owing to the diversity of its objects and the casualties which affect them, there is no reason to doubt but that with an increase of knowledge, on those cardinal points which alone can enhance the value of labour, the earnings of the whole class may be increased. And how is this "knowledge" to be obtained? How is the intelligence which guides the mechanical to be imparted to the agricultural labourer?
This directly brings us to the subject of education and its influence on the agricultural labourer by bringing his mind to bear on his physical duties.
The state of education among agricultural labourers was truly indicated by the Royal Commissioners appointed in 1861, to inquire into the state of public education in England, when they said that in the British Army, which, I believe, is chiefly made up out of the agricultural class, "out of 10,000 soldiers examined in 1856, more than one-fourth could not write, and more than one-fifth could not read, while in the British Foreign Legion, raised in 1855, four-fifths of the Italians and 97 per cent. of the Germans, could both read and write." Those, however, who are brought often into contact with the English farm labourer, as I happen to be, require no statistics to prove the almost total absence of education that exists among them. We can only wonder that with a nation so advanced in civilisation as our own, such a condition of mind should be allowed to lower one particular class without a general effort on
