Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850.Various
General
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850.
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Civilization -- Periodicals; Culture -- Periodicals
whole manner showing that he feels himself at a distance from you,
greater than should separate any two classes of men. He is often
doubtful when you address, and suspicious when you question him; he is
seemingly oppressed with the interview, while it lasts, and obviously
relieved when it is over. These are the traits which I can affirm them
to possess as a class, after having come in contact with many hundreds
of farm laborers. They belong to a generation for whose intellectual
culture little or nothing was done. As a class, they have no amusements
beyond the indulgence of sense. In nine cases out of ten, recreation is
associated in their minds with nothing higher than sensuality. I have
frequently asked clergymen and others, if they often find the adult
peasant reading for his own or others' amusement? The invariable answer
is, that such a sight is seldom or never witnessed. In the first place,
_the great bulk of them can not read_. In the next, a large proportion
of those who can do so with too much difficulty to admit of the exercise
being an amusement to them. Again, few of those who can read with
comparative ease, have the taste for doing so. It is but justice to them
to say, that many of those who can not read, have bitterly regretted, in
my hearing, their inability to do so. I shall never forget the tone in
which an old woman in Cornwall intimated to me what a comfort it would
now be to her, could she only read her Bible in her lonely hours."
We now turn to the high lights of the picture as presented abroad, and
which, from their very brightness, throw our own intellectual gloom into
deeper shade. Mr. Kay observes in the work we have already cited:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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