learn enough for his purpose, although even
after he has taken his diploma he will feel that
the two years' curriculum was all too short. His
age now will be nineteen. Armed with exact
scientific knowledge, which he has been taught
how to apply to every detail of agriculture, let
him proceed to work and watch for himself,
during the next two years, on any large well
managed farm, taking a salary, perhaps, for the
assistance he can give. At the end of that
term he has reached the age of one and twenty.
It is his own fault then if he be not in his own
profession, what his cousin who goes every
October to his London hospital will hardly be
till a couple of years later in life, a duly qualified
practitioner. Their day may be long coming,
but of some such sort must be the English
farmers of a day to come.

DUTY.
IF thou hast Yesterday thy duty done,
And thereby clear'd firm footing for To-day,
"Whatever clouds make dark To-morrow's sun,
Thou shalt not miss thy solitary way.

THE RUFFIAN.

BY THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER.

I ENTERTAIN so strong an objection to the
euphonious softening of Ruffian into Rough,
which has lately become popular, that I restore
the right word to the heading of this paper;
the rather, as my object is to dwell upon the
fact that the Ruffian is tolerated among us to
an extent that goes beyond all unruffianly endurance.
I take the liberty to believe that if
the Ruffian besets my life, a professional Ruffian
at large in the open streets of a great city,
notoriously having no other calling than that of
Ruffian, and of disquieting and despoiling me as
I go peacefully about my lawful business,
interfering with no one, then the Government under
which I have the great constitutional privilege,
supreme honour and happiness, and all the rest
of it, to exist, breaks down in the discharge of
any Government's most simple elementary duty.

What did I read in the London daily papers,
in the early days of this last September? That
the Police had " AT LENGTH SUCCEEDED IN
CAPTURING TWO OF THE NOTORIOUS GANG THAT
HAVE SO LONG INFESTED THE WATERLOO-ROAD."
Is it possible? What a wonderful Police! Here
is a straight, broad, public thoroughfare of
immense resort; half a mile long; gas-lighted by
night; with a great gas-lighted railway station
in it, extra the street lamps; full of shops;
traversed by two popular cross thoroughfares
of considerable traffic; itself the main road
to the South of London; and the admirable
Police have, after long infestment of this dark
and lonely spot by a gang of Ruffians, actually
got hold of two of them. Why, can it be doubted
that any man of fair London knowledge and
common resolution, armed with the powers of
the Law, could have captured the whole
confederacy in a week?

It is to the saving up of the Ruffian class by
the Magistracy and Police—to the conventional
preserving of them, as if they were Partridges
—that their number and audacity must be in
great part referred. Why is a notorious Thief
and Ruffian ever left at large? He never turns
his liberty to any account but violence and
plunder, he never did a day's work out of jail,
he never will do a day's work out of jail. As a
proved notorious Thief he is always consignable
to prison for three months. When he comes
out, he is surely as notorious a Thief as he was
when he went in. Then send him back again.
"Just Heaven!" cries the Society for the
protection of remonstrant Ruffians, " This is
equivalent to a sentence of perpetual
imprisonment!" Precisely for that reason it has
my advocacy. I demand to have the Ruffian
kept out of my way, and out of the way of all
decent people. I demand to have the Ruffian
employed, perforce, in hewing wood and drawing
water somewhere for the general service,
instead of hewing at her Majesty's subjects and
drawing their watches out of their pockets. If
this be termed an unreasonable demand, then
the tax-gatherer's demand on me must be far
more unreasonable, and cannot be otherwise
than extortionate and unjust.

It will be seen that I treat of the Thief and
Ruffian as one. I do so, because I know the
two characters to be one, in the vast majority of
cases, just as well as the Police know it. (As
to the Magistracy, with a few exceptions, they
know nothing about it but what the Police
choose to tell them.) There are disorderly
classes of men who are not thieves; as railway-
navigators, brickmakers, wood-sawyers,
costermongers. These classes are often disorderly
and troublesome; but it is mostly among
themselves, and at any rate they have their
industrious avocations, they work early and late, and
work hard. The generic Ruffian—honourable
member for what is tenderly called the Rough
Element—is either a Thief, or the companion
of Thieves. When he infamously molests women
coming out of chapel on Sunday evenings (for
which I would have his back scarified often
and deep) it is not only for the gratification
of his pleasant instincts, but that there may be
a confusion raised by which either he or his
friends may profit, in the commission of highway
robberies or in picking pockets. When he gets a
police-constable down and kicks him helpless
for life, it is because that constable once did
his duty in bringing him to justice. When he
rushes into the bar of a public-house and scoops
an eye out of one of the company there, or
bites his ear off, it is because the man he
maims gave evidence against him. When he
and a line of comrades extending across the footway
—say of that solitary mountain-spur of the
Abruzzi, the Waterloo Road—advance towards
me, " skylarking" among themselves, my purse
or shirt pin is in predestined peril from his
playfulness. Always a Ruffian, always a Thief.
Always a Thief, always a Ruffian.

Now, when I, who am not paid to know these