In conclusion,--let me observe that some of the foregoing cases are shocking ones; but they are only too true; and such are but the events of every day in those sleepy hollows, where public opinion has no weight, and where ignorance and avarice are handed down from age to age. I have seen hundreds of such things in such places. And what mode of regeneration shall reach this class of people, who have the rust of whole ages in their souls? You cannot offer to them education, as you do to the poor. You cannot reason with them, as with the poor. They have too much pride. It can only be by educating all around them, that you can reach them. When they feel the effect of the education of the poor, their pride will compel them to educate their children. This will be one of the many good results that will flow from the education of the poor in the back settlements of England. Let us, then, direct the stream of knowledge into the remotest of these obscure places. If the penny periodicals were, by some means, made to circulate there, as they circulate in towns--the _Penny Magazine_, and _Saturday Magazine_, with their host of wood-cuts and useful facts; and _Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal_, with its more refined and poetical spirit,--they would work a great change. Prints and cuts from good originals would awaken a better taste; higher ideas of the beauty of created forms: for I say with Rogers, Be mine to bless the more mechanic skill That stamps, renews, and multiplies at will; And cheaply circulates through distant climes, The fairest relics of the purest times. We blame our populace for not possessing the same refined taste as the French and Italians; for being brutal and destructive; that parks, public walks, and public buildings, cannot be thrown open to them without receiving injury. We ought not to blame them for this; for is not this the _English spirit_ that has been praised in Parliament? for the encouragement of which, bull-baitings, dog-fightings, cock-fightings, and boxings have been pleaded for by senators, as its proper aliment? and the Romans, with their gladiatorial shows, quoted as good precedents? Forgetting that while the Romans were a growing and conquering people, they were a simple and domestic people. When they had their amphitheatres and their bloody shows of battling-men and beasts, they fell under imperial despotism, and thence into national destruction. If we will have a better spirit, we must take better means to produce it. We can never make our rural population too well informed. Ireland, with all manner of horrible outrages, England with its rick-burnings, and Scotland with its orderly peasantry, all point towards the evils of ignorance and oppression, and the national advantage and individual happiness that are to be reaped from the spread of sound knowledge through our rural districts. [Illustration] CHAPTER III. NOOKS OF THE WORLD: LIFE IN THE DALES OF LANCASHIRE AND YORKSHIRE.