desultory drinking: these are the sum and total of it; no, add a little desultory smoking and purposeless mischief to make it complete. Why should not the labourer be made to feel an interest in the welfare, the prosperity, and progress of his own village? Why should he not be supplied with a motive for united action? All experience teaches that united action, even on small matters, has a tendency to enlarge the minds and the whole powers of those engaged. The labourer feels so little interest in his own progress, because the matter is only brought before him in its individual bearing. You can rarely interest a single person in the improvement of himself, but you can interest a number in the progress of that number as a body. The vacancy of mind, the absence of any ennobling aspiration, so noticeable in the agricultural labourer, is a painful fact. Does it not, in great measure, arise from this very desultory life--from this procrastinating dislike to active exertion? Supply a motive--a general public motive--and the labourer will wake up. At the present moment, what interest has an ordinary agricultural labourer in the affairs of his own village? Practically none whatever. He may, perhaps, pay rates; but these are administered at a distance, and he knows nothing of the system by which they are dispensed. If his next-door neighbour's cottage is tumbling down, the thatch in holes, the doors off their hinges, it matters nothing to him. Certainly, he cannot himself pay for its renovation, and there is no fund to which he can subscribe so much as a penny with that object in view. A number of cottages may be without a supply of water. Well, he cannot help it; probably he never gives a thought to it. There is no governing body in the place responsible for such things--no body in the election of which he has any hand. He puts his hands in his pockets and slouches about, smoking a short pipe, and drinks a quart at the nearest ale-house. He is totally indifferent. To go still further, there can be no doubt that the absence of any such ruling body, even if ruling only on sufferance, has a deteriorating effect upon the minds of the best-informed and broadest-minded agriculturist. He sees a nuisance or a grievance, possibly something that may approach the nature of a calamity. 'Ah, well,' he sighs, 'I can't help it; I've no power to interfere.' He walks round his farm, examines his sheep, pats his horses, and rides to market, and naturally forgets all about it. Were there any ready and available means by which the nuisance could be removed, or the calamity in some measure averted, the very same man would at once put it in motion, and never cease till the desired result was attained; but the total absence of any authority, any common centre, tends to foster what appears an utter indifference. How can it be otherwise? The absence of such a body tends, therefore, in two ways to the injury of the labourer: first, because he has no means of helping