Farmers entertain the supremest contempt for the agricultural labourer's attempts to better himself. To them they are almost impious; but the farmer is himself tarred with the same brush of culture. He is a vastly different fellow from his grandfather, who actually helped to till the soil among his own men; whose wife and daughters were noted hands at milking and buttermaking; who lived in the kitchen, among the hams and the domestic utensils, and was not above eating the same food as, and at the same table with, his ploughmen and carters. He has, in fact, and so also have the landed proprietor and the labourer, undergone a process of levelling up. It is a process which had started certainly by 1825, when Cobbett noticed it. Hear him:-- "When the old farmhouses are down (and down they must come in time) what a miserable thing the country will be! Those that are now erected are mere painted shells, with a mistress within who is stuck up in a place she calls the parlour, with, if she have children, the 'young ladies and gentlemen' about her; some showy chairs and a sofa (a _sofa_ by all means); half-a-dozen prints in gilt frames hanging up; some swinging book-shelves with novels and tracts upon them; a dinner brought in by a girl that is perhaps better 'educated' than she; two or three nick-nacks to eat, instead of a piece of bacon and a pudding; the house too neat for a dirty-shoed carter to be allowed to come into; and everything proclaiming to every sensible beholder that there is here a constant anxiety to make a _show_ not warranted by the reality. The children (which is the worst part of it) are all too clever to _work;_ they are all to be _gentlefolks_. Go to _plough_! Good God! What! 'young gentlemen' go to plough! They become _clerks_, or some skimming-dish thing or other. They flee from the dirty _work_ as cunning horses do from the bridle. What misery is all this! What a mass of materials for proclaiming that general and _dreadful convulsion_ that must, first or last, come and blow this funding and jobbing and enslaving and starving system to atoms."