a reason for every modification. The reason, moreover, is the same as that which has fixed the shape of scythes, namely, to facilitate a difficult technical action. Nor is the type of shovel or spade any longer uncertain, albeit there are varieties of it. In the hands of generations of skilful laborers either tool has found its necessary definite form: the tree tapering not without grace into the appointed curve of the iron; the blade wide and thin and shapely. And the type is so nearly perfect that the predilections of individual workmen may be ignored. They are too insignificant to be worth the manufacturer's attention. If our old laborer's spade had not quite a nice lift, yet it was a pretty little spade. had been made in America-at Chicago -stamped out with thousands more which were all fit and saleable, because all conformed to the unchangeable type towards which skill was striving before America had been heard of. It is hard to conceive a stronger proof of the existence of technique in shovelling and digging.

And it

Of the technique which goes with hoeing the evidence is delightfully different. Spades may be best made at Chicago or at Birmingham, because the unwieldy iron and steel of them can be more finely forged by steamhammers than by the village smith. But a hoe, being smaller, lighter, altogether more manageable, may be made by any blacksmith worth his Balt. Consequently, although machine made hoes are to be had cheap at any Ironmonger's shop, the hand-made article holds its own in the market. For it would appear that a hoe is a more delicate instrument than a casual observer might suppose. For instance, the tool with which one man may do excellent work does not always suit another equally capable man, even on the same soil, until the adjustment of the handle in the socket has been al

tered. The soil, again, may necessitate a more radical change in the tool, beyond the hoer's power to effect; and this is where the local smith comes in, providing the hoe generally found most serviceable in his district. Not many years ago, the West Surrey laborer in want of a good hoe preferred one made by a certain blacksmith in Farnham, who knew better than can be known at Birmingham what was likely to be useful in his district. For wearing thin and true, and for convenient "set" at the neck, this man's hoes in his best days could not be surpassed; but at the present time the really desirable hoes for the same country come from a smithy at Milford, near Godalming. And these are so so generally approved that farmers for miles round lay in a stock of them to sell to their men, who, veritable connoisseurs, will sooner pay their employer for a Milford hoe than go to a shop for a less useful though perhaps a cheaper tool. Yet near Aldershot, and therefore practically in the same neighborhood, there are places where the Milford hoe is found unsuitable to certain peculiarities of the soil, and in these places the preferred pattern is one obtained at Guildford. In view of all this, it cannot be necessary to insist further upon the fineness of the technique of hoeing. The fact that businesses thrive by supplying its demands places its existence beyond a doubt. Actually there is money in the recognition of it.

Indeed, in these local reputations for the make of certain tools we tap another source of evidence, if more evidence were needed, of the great technical accomplishments of our laboring folk. Though less often now than of old, yet still in sequestered villages, in workshops never heard of by technical educators, good workmen win, not to publicity perhaps, but to a curious fame amongst other working-men,

for their known ability in making beautiful or fit tools. The present writer remembers a blacksmith in a village too small to afford the man more than half a living, who earned the other half by "lining" or repointing with steel the pickaxes and diggingforks brought to him by outside appreciators. And we may recall the noted Pyecombe crooks, mentioned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in "Rodney Stone." At one time, no South-Down shepherd felt himself properly equipped for his work without a crook from the Pyecombe smithy. Of course no one needs convincing that a shepherd's work is full of minute technicalitieswe have read about them in Mr. Hardy's amongst other books: but the tale of human struggle and human skill suggested by a Pyecombe crook, polished bright as silver for a good reason, is one that would surpass all the art of fiction to tell. The temptation is great to go on and speak of a family of smiths, in a village no one ever heard of out of Surrey, whose edged-tools-axes, chisels, planes-were coveted thirty years ago by all wheelwrights and carpenters for miles round: or of a wheelwright not so very far from the same village, whose wagons to-day are in demand from Woking to the Isle of Wight.

Without, however, wandering so far from the peasant laborer, mention may yet be made of other essentially rustic occupations that have their full measure of mystery. Not to speak of sawyers who have almost disappeared before the steam saw-for their exhausting labor in couples impelled them to get drunk singly, and too often on alternate days, to the unbearable annoyance of their employers; or of threshers, whose winter employment has made way for the charms of the steam threshing-machine; or of thatchers, or harvesters, or brick-makers, or quarrymen, there are the "hedgers and

ditchers," whose work is not quite so simple as might be thought. Only the other day a farmer was complaining that, though he could find three months' work for a man at hedging and ditching, he could not find a man able to do the work, which, therefore, would have to be left undone. Again, there are the copse-cutters, too interesting to be quite passed over. According to an old farm-hand, "There's a great deal of art in copsin'. You gets so much a hundred for everything you can save; so a man got to keep his eye on what he got in his hand, to see what he can make of it. There's poles, and bow-shores, and shackles" (listen to the technical words-they relate to hurdle-making and sheep-folding), "and rods, and pea-sticks-everything before the bavin comes; and bavin is the last. You gets so much a hundred for 'em all, and if a man don't make the most of 'em, he may soon throw away a day's earnin'."

To finish, there is the ancient craft of charcoal-burning, carried on mysteriously in remote forest dells, and probably little changed in any of its details since the time of those men who once emerged so strangely from the depths of the New Forest into English history, to pick up the body of a king. In what follows-it is the substance of a conversation on the subject with an old laboring man-two points are worth observing: first, the laborer's interest in a technique admittedly outside his own province; and second, the curious way in which these more recondite traditional crafts grouped families together, linked the generations, and gave characteristics to whole villages. We had been speaking of a man who was "gone down Horsham way, burnin'," and soon it came out that this man's native place was a near village, where, a generation ago, half the people had the same surname as his, and all of that name were char

coal-burners. "A rare payin' job," the laborer called it. He had "knowed old Jack say at the end of a season that he'd saved a tea-pot full o' sovereigns" from charcoal-burning. "One ⚫ these brown tea-pots-you knows. 'Twas piece-work-so much a settin'. I remember once old So-and-So got me to go burnin' with 'n down at Culverley for a week. And we burnt six settin's that week. He got six or seven-seven or eight pound for it. He paid me thirty shillin's-me, a mere unskilled helper.

"It's night an' day work. You got to keep goin' round the fires at night, 'r else p'r'aps they'd blow or something go wrong." So, lest a wind should rise in the night-the softest breeze through the woods-and set the fire "blowing" or flaring, there must be watch kept, and a shovel handy for throwing up earth.

But it is not a job to be undertaken without training. The laborer continued, "I never knowed anybody but them of that name do it about here. Now and again one 'd go 'long with 'em, same as me that time; but that was only laborin'. There was old Rubber, we used to call 'n, what had a little hopground... he said one year he'd burn his charcoal hisself. He didn't see why he should pay they so much for doin' of it." Accordingly he started, The Corabill Magazine.

but "Sonny's wife was goin' along by, and she says, "There's something wrong with that pit. I en't a charcoal-burner,' she says, 'but I sleeps with one, and I knows enough to know there's something wrong.'" And sure enough, the unlucky Rubber's pit "blowed. Flames went up as high as your head," converting a good charcoal setting into a mere wasteful bonfire. It is interesting to note the ignorance which "Sonny's wife" owned to, in spite of her exceptional opportunities for learning; but more interesting still is her partial initiation into the mysteries of the craft, obtained doubtless by practical experience "I've seen the wives out with their husbands," the laborer said, "wheelin' the timber to the pits;" and perhaps Sonny's wife had done a laborer's part in that way. At any rate, the burning pit, that gave no warning to the inexpert, had a message for her more practised senses, in whose increased vitality one perceives the beginnings of a technique.

Commenting on the hapless Rubber's misfortune, the laborer had one remark too sensible to be forgotten: indeed, it may be commended to technical educators as a maxim worthy of their consideration: "If you don't know what you be up to, you'll get wrong with it."

George Bourne.

The late Marquess of Salisbury has been called, not very happily, the Last of the Tories. It might be nearer to truth to say that he was the Last of the Whigs. As we look back upon his career, we are reminded of those dignified aristocrats who ruled England

under the ægis of the "great houses," and from the vantage ground of a family "connection." He belongs to the line of the Saviles, the Pelhams, the Temples, the Rockinghams, the Greys, the Lansdownes, and the Russells, who were the members, as it seemed, by right

of birth and station, of a lofty governing oligarchy, which did much to justify its position by high talent, conscientious integrity, and an earnest sense of public responsibility. And it may be that this dynasty of grands seigneurs, who under one party name or the other have so often guided the destinies of the Empire, has come to its close with the first Prime Minister of King Edward's reign. It does not seem likely that the Premiership, unless the political complications of the immediate future should drift into that office the Duke of Devonshire or Earl Spencer, will ever again be held by a man without a great popular following, and without a genuine hold upon the imagination, or at any rate, the prejudices of the electorate.

Lord Salisbury did not attain to high office in virtue of such qualifications, any more than Melbourne, Aberdeen, and the fourteenth Earl of Derby; and like these earlier Prime Ministers of Queen Victoria's reign, he cannot be said to have been called to the supreme post by the verdict of "the People." The voice of the constituencies had not marked him out for election, when the death of Lord Beaconsfield, the activity of Lord Randolph Churchill, and the eclipse of Sir Stafford Northcote placed him in command of the Conservative camp. He had risen in the same way as the great aristocratic politicians, with whom in this respect he is compared. Introduced at an early age to the House of Commons, he gained a reputation in that assembly for capacity and knowledge of affairs. There are men-and it would be easy to point to examples in the present Legislature-who inspire the House with confidence and respect, though on the larger public outside they make very little impression. Lord Cranbourne, in the 'sixties, was one of these. To the shrewd observers of the London salons and political coteries,

it seemed natural enough that, at sixand-thirty, a still untried administrator, he should be asked to join the Derby Cabinet, with the portfolio of the India Office. The nation, the world outside this managing circle, acquiesced, as it always does, in the appointment of Cabinet Ministers, with which, after all, it has nothing to do. It acquiesced also in Lord Salisbury's advancement, in the course of the next few years, to still higher rank in the executive hierarchy, and watched him become in turn Special Envoy to Constantinople in 1876, Foreign Secretary in 1878, Plenipotentiary to the Berlin Congress, and eventually Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury. But one may doubt whether the public at large really began to know him till he was pretty far down into his second Premiership. Perhaps even then they did not know him very well, though in his closing years he was the centre of such reverence and ungrudged regard as is given to few among our statesmen. The Lord of Hatfield, sitting aloof from the turmoil of parties, serene and massive, leaving the House of Commons to jangle, and the platforms to reverberate, while he swayed the balance of Britain's fate with a firm, unerring hand, he was an impressive figure; perhaps the most impressive in Europe since Bismarck. But he had never become interesting, as Mr. Gladstone was, and Lord Beaconsfield, as Mr. Chamberlain is, as Lord Rosebery might be, if he chose.

His last illness, his death, attracted singularly little attention, even in these journalistic days. The newspapers paid their perfunctory "tributes"; the public remained, I fear, indifferent. A few years ago a young poet and novelist, the writer of some stirring verses, some striking stories, fell ill at a New York hotel. The Anglo-Saxon world watched by his bedside. The cables throbbed with the latest news of his

sickness. Men asked each other in railway-carriages and tramcars how "he" was, and discussed the medical bulletins with unaffected concern. One did not detect any sign of this popular interest when Lord Salisbury was lying on his death-bed. They held a service in honor of Lord Salisbury on the last day of last month, and it passed almost unnoticed. There was no crowding, no throng of eager sightseers, outside Westminster Abbey; a few policemen were dotted about the precincts, but they were scarcely needed. Indifferently the passers-by on foot, or on the roofs of omnibuses, turned their heads as the solemn note of the bell crossed the rattle of Victoria Street, and now and again some faint strain of Schubert or Chopin was wafted through the windows of the great Minster. But men and women went by upon their own occasions, casual, inattentive, not pausing to remember that here was a solemn ceremony in memory of one who had been a Prince among his peers, who had sat in council with Emperors and Kings, who had swayed the destinies of a quarter of the human race, and had gone to his rest after being three times Prime Minister of England. Sic transit gloria. The text is an old one; but it is not quite the moral of this case. It was clear that in our age of gossip, so eager for the concrete, so keen after the "personal note," the individuality of the dead statesman had never stamped itself upon the public consciousness. He was a great abstraction, an embodiment of power, of dignity, of political virtue; not a man to be talked about and known.

To a large extent this feeling, or absence of feeling, on the part of the public, was of his own creation. He did not seek popularity, and may even be said to have taken some pains to 1 The exception to this general statement is his Presidential Address at the British Associa

avoid it. A reserved man, very proud, shy, sensitive, and self-contained, he shrank from that blaze of vulgar illumination, under which it is now the fashion for anybody, who is at all eminent or distinguished, to pass his life. He did none of the things which commend a statesman to the attention of a discriminating democracy and those who minister to its tastes. He must have been the despair of the paragraphists, who, in the end, were compelled to leave him alone for sheer lack of matter. He did not own racehorses, like one eminent contemporary, or grow orchids like another, or cut down trees, or play golf, or ride the bicycle, or, so far as was known, indulge in any kind of active sport, amusement, or recreation whatsoever; nor did he write novels, or Essays on Philosophic Doubt, or magazine articles on the classics and theology, or agreeable monographs on English statesmen, and "readable" accounts of the Last Phase of Napoleon. He spent many hours in his library and his laboratory; but he never published a book. It was characteristic of him that even in his earlier days of literary activity, he wrote nothing under his own name. His forcible, closely-reasoned essays were buried anonymously in the pages of the Quarterly, or the "leader" columns of daily and weekly newspapers. He is understood to have pondered deeply over some problems in chemistry and physics; but the public knew nothing of his researches, for he kept the results to himself.1 Nor had he any taste or desire for miscellaneous social intercourse. He cared neither for the club nor the salon, and the "smart society" of London knew nothing of him. He had none of Mr. Gladstone's versatile interest in men and things, and his viridescent delight in the passing show of life, his shorttion, which was republished under the title of "Evolution, a Retrospect," in 1894.