Mr. Fawcett was on Wednesday obliged to withdraw his Bill
for the regulation of gangs employed in field labour. The farmera are at heart opposed to interference, and the squires, who obey them, seized on the compulsory clauses of the Bill as a very good ground of objection. They are wise in their generation. So long as the compulsory clauses are rejected there never will be a truly popular system of education, and after an, two or three years' delay do not matter much. Three years hence the Education grant, of which Lord R. Montagu on Tuesday made BO much,— some trumpery sum of three-quarters of a million,—will be quin- tupled, and the worthy agriculturists who are now GO timid will be shrieking for more schools. Do they know how the common- school system was carried in Rhode Island ? The worthy farmers of that State would not have it, did not, as they said, want to be taxed in order to be outdone by their own labourers. Glorious ignorance and household suffrage were combined, till one fine day the freeholders found that an agrarian law was within an ace of being accepted. They were converted as rapidly as Lord Derby was by the fall of the Hyde Park railings, and in two years edu- cation was the heaviest item in the State budget. Property in Rhode Island is now as safe as in Suffolk.
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