eventually become his own. The Government, however, that accomplishes this happy transformation will ask from the labourers it seeks to uplift evidence and guarantees of industry, thrift and character. If town life has its undoubted attractions, it also has a darker side of misery and privation, and the evils too often outweigh the good. But country life has its varied advantages, not less real because they are often overlooked. It is said sometimes that the country is dull. "Dulness, however, is the disease of the unoccupied. We hear a good deal just now of the dulness of village life. That is a sheer invention of politicians who want a humanitarian cry, and of town folk with nothing to do. Honest villagers are much too busy sowing, reaping, thatching, hedging and ditching, carting manure and driving cows a-field, to be dull. Dishonest and lazy villagers would be dull anywhere."-Standard, Dec. 10. First and foremost of the advantages of country life, we may place that inestimable blessing, good health, and, as a natural consequence of good health, a longer life. At a very low estimate, life in the country is lengthened by ten years above the average of life in towns. Some few years since the writer, visiting a village in Wiltshire (where the smallness of wage gave the peasantry good cause for discontent) for the purpose of dividing a field of forty acres into allotments, found that the vicar had given offence by saying that "the labourers ought not to grumble at their lot, seeing that they were living in a village so healthy and salubrious in its character that it was a difficult thing for anyone to die in it." Without doubt the salubrity of country air, the beauty of country surroundings, and the quiet serenity that marks country life are blessings which should be gratefully appreciated by those whose lot is cast among them. But as riches, which enable us to participate in all the luxuries and delights of life, lose nearly all their value to the sufferer from a painful and incurable malady, so in like manner the privilege of long life would be very lightly esteemed by labourers doomed to a ceaseless round of weary toil upon wages that scarcely kept starvation from their door. Happily the days of agricultural depression are, let us hope, drawing rapidly to their close. The need of to-day is to re-populate the villages; to enliven the rural landscape with the picturesque tenements of a contented peasantry, dwellings suggestive of comfort, convenience, ease and plenty for those who dwell in them. These men will be the small farmers of the future, and the spread of education will henceforth dispel much, if not all, of the ignorance that marked the past. To the enlightened tillage of industry and intelligence the earth will soon double her usual increase, and in such circumstances happiness will cease to be a rare attainment, and contentment will become an easy virtue. But life in the country has still other and deeper advantages; it tends to quicken and elevate the moral character by the insight which it gives into the marvellous order and beauty and purpose of surrounding Nature. The heavens, which are all but hidden in our towns, are here unveiled before us in rich and gorgeous magnificence, and thus it is not only possible but easy for those who dwell amid the quietude of rural scenes, who are privileged to gaze on the glory of the setting or the rising sun, or to look on the vault of night made resplendent with myriads of brilliant stars, to adore as well as to wonder, and so to rise through the contemplation of Nature to the thought of the wondrous wisdom and power by which this Nature has been fashioned and is still sustained. Men see here the mechanism of the Universe, and the thoughtful and reflective mind will feel all the nearer, for the vision it beholds, to the God who rules it. And thus an American poet, William Cullen Bryant, writes: "The groves were God's first temples. Ere man learned To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave, And spread the roof above them-ere he framed The lofty vault, to gather and roll back The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood, And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks Who Again, to dwellers in the country what thoughts are suggested by the changing seasons of the year. can close his mind as he witnesses the ever-operating miracle, by which the sterility of winter gives place to the bright promise of the fertile spring, and this to the beauteous flowers of summer, and to the golden fruits of autumn; who does not feel as the bounteous produce of the earth comes to him, as it were, direct from the open hand of God, that he could find it in his heart to say with the Psalmist : "O come, let us worship and bow down, and kneel before the Lord our Maker. "For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand." And who also does not feel, in greater or in lesser degree, an impulse that would bid us "To the beautiful order of His works Learn to conform the order of our lives." "The serenity," says a beautiful writer, Leo Grindon, "which we find in the fields and the woods, and by clear streams, we imbibe into our own hearts, and thus derive from Nature itself the very condition of spirit which is needful for the enjoyment of it. In towns we may find diversion, but we cannot find repose. Calmness, in which' alone the soul can put forth its leaves and blossoms, is for rural solitudes alone to give. Cheerfulness, which arises only from the peaceful enlightenment of the spirit, finds in the same quietude its sincerest and warmest friend." "I wondered," said Rousseau, describing his first experience of the power of country scenes to quell a perturbed spirit, "I wondered to find that inanimate beings should have power to overrule our most violent passions, and I despised the impotence of Philosophy for having less power over the soul than a succession of lifeless objects." If anyone would like to prove this power on his own person, let him go where he can hear the sound of the rustling leaves, and the singing of the birds; where he can view without effort the smooth green grass, stretching far away, interrupted only by masses of foliage, water in the distance, its ripples lighted by the sun; let him go alone amid these things and live with them for half an hour, and then say seriously, if he can, that he has not felt his spirit breathed upon by an unseen power and ascend under that breath into a serener and holier life. "When the vexations of the world have broken in upon me," says Waterton, “I go away for an hour or two amid the birds of the valley, and I seldom fail to return with better feelings than when I set out.' The spiritual is ever near us, but it is in the solitudes of Nature, where we are face to face with the unmarred works of God, that our hearts are most accessible to His inspirations. Although the country may lack some of the questionable excitements that are so plentiful in our large towns, and not a few of which are of a palpably demoralizing character, yet it has simpler and safer pleasures of its ownhunting, shooting, fishing, often boating, and to these we may add the delight of country walks, the bracing influences of country games; the studies of the botanist and the entomologist, the delights of gardening where flowers put on their freshest beauty and where fruits acquire their most luscious flavour. These things will assure us that country life, in this age in which telegraphs and railways, daily papers and serial literature keep us, mentally as well as physically, in touch with all that the towns can furnish; the life which puts the bloom of health upon our cheeks, which brightens our spirits, strengthens our muscles, and which adds years to the span of our existence, is a desirable life for all classes and will prove a veritable paradise to the starving and pauper population of our towns, and that in home colonization, under wise and careful administration, the social salvation of these classes will be most surely found. "Dirt," said Lord Palmerston, "is but matter in the wrong place." So in like manner our congested towns and cities are but masses of men in the wrong place, are men wrongly situated, crowding our dockyard gates clamouring for employment whereby to live, but too often clamouring in vain. Numbers of these men are country born, and have left their village homes because their toil was long and their wages were small. Let us hope that the day is drawing near that will see many of these men attracted back to the land that needs their tillage; for when that day comes, and its advent is very near, the scanty wages will be replaced by a virtual ownership in the soil they till; and the men themselves, no longer |
