The next change is in education. Sixty years ago the mass of the country was uneducated. Millions could neither read nor write; millions could read a little and could not write at all. The whole country is now educated--in every rural village, in every crowded city street, there is a school, and the children are compelled to come in. In addition to the schools there are village libraries, institutions with lending libraries, public libraries where the best literature of the past and the present is freely offered to the people. They can carry home the books, they can have as many books as they are able to read. We are creating new readers by the million. Are we, it is often asked, creating also a whole nation of students? Hardly. Education does not create students, who are born, not made. Besides, we do not want to become a nation of students. The hard work of the world is not done by students or philosophers. Education, however, teaches us something of our own ignorance, something of the source of information, something of humility. Above all, education falling on a kindly soul gives the lad a new recreation for his evenings: instead of horse-play along the streets, instead of drinking at a bar, instead of “keeping company” with a girl every evening, he reads. He does not read for instruction, he pursues no course of study, he reads just for recreation; but such is the character of the reading found for him that he imbibes a great amount of information, learns manners, and acquires a higher standard of morals. The circulation of the penny weeklies proves that he reads; there are a hundred of them at least; their circulation is enormous, some of them attaining to half a million. If we buy some and look at them we find them “scrappy”; they are not vicious, or immoral, or seditious, they are the exact opposites of these; but they are scrappy; it would seem as if their readers, which is probably the fact, are incapable of a sustained argument, and like to be stimulated by short stories of adventure, odds and ends of history, and so forth. Think, however, of the change from a nation which was in great part illiterate in 1837 to a nation which knows something of history and something of geography, and which now reads with avidity. Hardly a cottager now but takes in his weekly newspaper. Lloyd’s _Weekly News_ is, I believe, the most widely circulated of them. It claims more than a million readers; it owns a great pine-forest in Norway to supply its paper, and it is a most respectable paper, popular and full of news, taking one side strongly, but never scurrilous. If you want to understand the English rustic of the day, send for the last number of Lloyd’s and read it through. I am sure that after reading this journal your appreciation of the British rustic will be distinctly raised. And you will own that he is changed indeed. [Illustration: AN ETCHING BY HER MAJESTY]