"Your boy, yes," I answered. "How many other boys and girls in his class are going to college?" "Well, there's another one," he replied. "Out of a class of how many?" "Twenty," said he. "Hm--you want to make your school entirely for the 10 per cent., then?" He had no very adequate reply, and I departed, wondering anew at human selfishness. My next encounter was with the rector. He didn't believe in vocational education, either. He had one of those vague and paradoxically commendable though entirely fallacious reasons for his opposition which are almost the hardest to combat, because they are grounded in the fetish of the old "humanist" curriculum (which when it originated was strictly vocational). He didn't believe that trade instruction educated. There was no "culture" in it. I left him, wondering if Matthew Arnold hadn't done as much harm as good in the world. After that, Stella and I hunted up the superintendent of schools. We brought him and his wife over to dinner, and sat in the orchard afterward, talking. He was a pleasant man, who seemed to take a grateful interest in our enthusiasm, but supplied no hope. "Yes," he said, "there are seventy-one girls and eleven boys in the high school. It ought to be plain that something is wrong. But you are in the Town Meeting belt here, Mr. Upton, and you've got to get your arguments through the skulls of every voter in the place before we can have any money to work with. The Town Meeting is your truest democracy, they say. Perhaps that is why Germany has so much better schools than we do in rural New England!" I didn't quite believe him then, but I do now. I have seen a Bentford Town Meeting! Stella and I made a survey of the town during the ensuing autumn and winter, with the aid of the Town Clerk and the list of voters. As I have said, there are no manufactories of any sort in Bentford. It is exclusively a residence village, with a considerable summer population of wealthy householders who pay the great bulk of our taxes, and a considerable outlying rural population engaged (however desultorily) in agriculture. Our figures showed that out of a total voting population of six hundred and one males, one hundred and twenty were directly employed in some capacity as gardeners or caretakers on the estates of others, one hundred and forty were at least part time farmers, though they worked on the roads and did other jobs of a similar nature when they could, and at least fifty more were engaged in manual labour in some way connected with the soil or with the roads or trees. Three hundred and ten out of a total of six hundred and one, then, of the adult males of Bentford, were in a position to benefit by agricultural education--a truly tremendous proportion. At the same time we learned that exactly eighteen boys had gone to higher institutions of learning from the village in the past decade, and a slightly greater number of girls--most of the latter to normal school.