their duty like men; but in general, the apathy of the educated
classes is most disgraceful.

But the labourers, during the last ten years, are altogether better
off. Free trade has increased their food, without lessening their
employment. The politician who wishes to know the effect on
agricultural life of that wise and just measure, may find it in Mr.
Grey of Dilston's answers to the queries of the French Government.
The country parson will not need to seek so far. He will see it (if
he be an observant man) in the faces and figures of his school-
children. He will see a rosier, fatter, bigger-boned race growing
up, which bids fair to surpass in bulk the puny and ill-fed
generation of 1815-45, and equal, perhaps, in thew and sinew, to the
men who saved Europe in the old French war.

If it should be so (as God grant it may), there is little fear but
that the labouring men of England will find their aristocracy able
to lead them in the battle-field, and to develop the agriculture of
the land at home, even better than did their grandfathers of the old
war time.

To a thoughtful man, no point of the social horizon is more full of
light, than the altered temper of the young gentlemen. They have
their faults and follies still--for when will young blood be other
than hot blood? But when one finds, more and more, swearing
banished from the hunting-field, foul songs from the universities,
drunkenness and gambling from the barracks; when one finds
everywhere, whether at college, in camp, or by the cover-side, more
and more, young men desirous to learn their duty as Englishmen, and
if possible to do it; when one hears their altered tone toward the