The agricultural districts of Staffordshire have a population of under two hundred souls per square mile.  The pottery and iron districts of the same county of over seven hundred.  These swarms of men are not had where they labour, they are immigrants.  Take another instance, in Kent and Devonshire, the wages of farm labourers are eight to nine shillings a-week.  In North Cheshire they are fifteen.  The cost of living to the labourer in both places is about the same; fuel is cheap in Cheshire.  What makes the difference in the demand for labour in Cheshire but the steam-engines?

Towns must be prepared to lodge decently, and educate carefully, children of rural immigrants, or woe betide us all.  It is education that has saved the United States from the consequences of the tide of ignorant misery daily disembarking on the Atlantic shores.

Sometimes we hear fears for the condition of farmers under manufacturer landlords.  Those who express these fears must have travelled with their ears shut.  More than seventy per cent. of the great landowners in the great travelling counties are manufacturers, or merchants, or lawyers, by one or two descents.  In Lancashire, Cheshire, Yorkshire, or Warwickshire, examine closely, and you will find it so.  As a general rule, a rich pawnbroker retired will make a better landlord than a poor baronet.  But in this country two generations will make one of the baronet’s sons a successful shopkeeper, and the pawnbroker’s a baronet, or even a peer.

“I tell you what, sir,” said a talkative stud groom once, in charge of race horses for Russia, and travelling first class, “I’ve been in Petersburg, in Vienna, and in Berlin, and I lived ten years with the Earl of ——.  For all the points of blood our aristocracy will beat any of these foreign princes, counts, and dukes, either for figure or for going; but it won’t do to look into their pedigree, for the crosses that would ruin a race of horses, are the making of the breed of English noblemen.”

Here our irregular imperfect guidance ceases.  Perhaps, although deficient in minuteness of detail, this pot pourri of gossip, history, description, anecdote, suggestion, and opinion, may not only amuse the traveller by railway, but assist him in choosing routes leading to those scenes or those pursuits in which he feels an interest.

NOTES.

{67} The operation of this personal influence on the individual boys with whom he was brought into contact, was much assisted by the system which about this time began to prevail at public schools, of giving each boy a small room called “a study” of his own, in which he might keep his books, and where he could enjoy privacy.  The writer, who was at a public school both when all the boys lived in one great school-room in which privacy was impossible and after the separate studies were introduced, would wish to record his earnest conviction of the advantage