There is an exceedingly able and interesting paper in Friday's
Times on "The Industrial North," the general drift of which is that the feelings and temper of the North are not really well understood in the South of England, the writer even remarking that the failure of the Education Bill last Session was greatly due to the omission of the Government to consult the temper of the people of Lancashire as to the best mode of supplying the wants of the voluntary schools. The sturdiness of the North and its rather grim self-will, is admirably illustrated by two anecdotes. A Yorkshire land- lord of very old family proposed to make an alteration in one of his tenant's farm buildings, which the tenant declined to permit, whereupon the landlord remarked very mildly that after all the building was his own Thereupon the tenant rejoined, "Nay, my forefather went to the Crusades with your fore- father, and you shan't touch a stone of it." Again, a daughter of one of the leading citizens of a Yorkshire town hinted to her father's gardener that the family would like to appropriate the greenhouse to the purposes of a vinery, whereupon she was told to let her father know "he may just choose betwixt me and t' grapes." Of course the proposal was abandoned.
Previous page
