all the figures with which I have be-dotted my paper, there is none more significant than the date with which I now record twenty completed years of grateful and uninterrupted friendship, during which your personal goodness has steadily kept open the door of free intercourse, which social distinctions and the personal failings of which I am too conscious might a thousand times have closed between us. March, 1874. COUNTY EDUCATION. :0: CHAPTER I. THE MIDDLE-CLASS OF ENGLAND. there would NOT many hundred years ago have been found in England two million inhabitants, of whom one million were slaves. At the present time there are to be found about a million paupers, or half-slavish class, and there may be another million who are in this exceptional sense free men, that they have more than enough to live on without working at all. But between those who have nothing to lose and those who have enough for every want and to spare, there are, perhaps, twenty millions who, with more or less reserve of capital, are earning their living by services rendered to others. In one sense all these are the "Middle-Class" of England. Between the extremes of affluence and indigence they 1 include as well those who earn their livelihood by the least esteemed manual labour as those who follow the most honoured profession. Within this larger range the term MiddleClass may, of course, be taken in a constantly narrowing sense, as a larger section above and below are set apart for the higher and lower classes. But with regard to Education there is nothing gained by forcing these distinctions, and we may take leave to think of the middleclass as including, in the widest sense, the great mass of the nation. And if we should succeed in establishing any public system of Education for the middle-class, it will possess a still stronger claim to the designation and to the importance of a national system than can be urged for "elementary Education," however necessary, or for "higher Education," however honourable and invaluable. I am aware that many persons much devoted to Education will not sympathise with a desire to give an almost paramount importance to the claims of the middle-class, or admit that it may justly be described as the national centre of gravity. They will grant that it is indeed an important class, but will hold its Education to be of quite |