work together to the same end, he owes his comparatively happy position to his superior education.
Thus the great exception of the Northumbrian peasant destroys the theory that evils attending the lot of the English labourer are mainly due to his miserable, unhealthy cottage. His material wants are signs rather than causes of the evil that besets and ruins his life. That evil must be sought in a circumstance with which these reports do not deal, a condition into which they make no inquiry. Yet, after all, nothing is so important to men as their religious environment.
The Northumbrian peasant is largely influenced by a form of Christianity that not only recognises that he is a man, but that, without ceasing to be a labouring man, tending sheep, or following the plough, he can be chosen, and is chosen, if found worthy, an elder of the Church. The labourers in most other parts of England have been regarded as a helot race, born to be hewers of wood and drawers of water,—brothers and friends in much the same sense that horses and dogs are brothers and friends. That this is no unfair view of the lordly way English gentlemen have of looking at the labouring classes is amusingly illustrated in these very reports, one of the Chief Commissioners giving it as his opinion that the cause of the happy position of the Northumbrian labourer compared with the southern labourer is "that he is better, educated, and hence is both mentally and physically a superior animal." The writer of these pages is no denominationalist, but so far as he has personal tastes and sympathies, they are not with Presbyterian forms, but with the liturgy of the Church of England. All the more he is bound to point out the superior educative power of the Presbyterian to the Church of England system, as seen in the higher form of the manhood and womanhood of the people under its control.
The reason is clear—the one is a democratic religion, the other the most aristocratic in the world. It is this characteristic of the Church of England which is mainly responsible for the degraded condition of the English rural poor.
