Four hundred years after the first printed book was sent out by Caxton the country has begun to read. An extraordinary reflection that twelve generations should pass away presenting the impenetrable front of indifference to the printing-press! The invention which travelled so swiftly from shore to shore till the remote cities of Mexico, then but lately discovered, welcomed it, for four centuries failed to enter the English counties. This incredible delay must not be supposed to be due to any exceptional circumstances or to inquisitorial action. The cause is found in the agricultural character itself. There has never been any difficulty in obtaining books in the country other than could be surmounted with patience. It is the peculiarity of knowledge that those who really thirst for it always get it. Books certainly came down in some way or other to Stratford-on-Avon, and the great mind that was growing there somehow found a means of reading them. Long, long before, when the printed page had not been dreamed of, the Grecian student, listening at the school, made his notes on oyster-shells and blade-bones. But here the will was wanting. There was no prejudice, for no people admired learning more than the village people, or gave it more willing precedence. It was simple indifference, which was mistaken for a lack of intelligence, but it was most certainly nothing of the kind. How great, then, must be the change when at last, after four hundred years, the country begins to read!

To read everything and anything! The cottagers in faraway hamlets, miles from a railway station, read every scrap of printed paper that drifts across their way, like leaves in autumn. The torn newspapers in which the grocer at the market town wraps up their weekly purchases, stained with tallow or treacle, are not burned heedlessly. Some paragraph, some fragment of curious information, is gathered from the pieces. The ploughman at his luncheon reads the scrap of newspaper in which his bread-and-cheese was packed for him. Men read the bits of paper in which they carry their screws of tobacco. The stone-pickers in spring in the meadows, often women, look at the bits of paper scattered here and there before putting them in their baskets. A line here and a line yonder, one to-day, one to-morrow, in time make material equal to a book. All information in our day filters through the newspapers. There is no subject you can name of which you may not get together a good body of knowledge, often superior, because more recent, than that contained in the best volumes, by watching the papers and cutting out the paragraphs that relate to it. No villager does that, but this ceaseless searching for scraps comes to something like the same thing in a more general manner.

London newspapers come now to the village and hamlet in all sorts of ways. Some by post, others by milk-cart, by carrier, by travellers; for country folk travel now, and invariably bring back papers bought at the railway bookstalls. After these have been read by the farmers and upper sort of people who purchased them, the fragments get out through innumerable channels to the cottages. The regular labourers employed on the farm often receive them as presents, and take nothing more gladly. If any one wishes to make a cottager a little present to show friendly remembrance, the best thing to send is a bundle of newspapers, especially, of course, if they are illustrated, which will be welcomed, and not a corner of the contents slurred over. Nothing is so contrary to fact as the common opinion that the agricultural labourer and his family are stupid and unintelligent. In truth, there are none who so appreciate information and they are quite capable of understanding anything that may be sent them in print.

London papers of various descriptions come to the villages now in greatly increased numbers, probably fifteen or twenty for one that formerly arrived, and all these, or some portion of each, are nearly sure to be ultimately perused by some cottager. At the inns and beer-houses there is now usually a daily paper, unless the distance is farther than general to a station, and then there are weeklies with summaries of everything. So that the London press is accessible at the meanest beer-house, and well bethumbed and besmeared the blackened sheets are, with holes where clumsy fingers have gone through. The shepherd in his hut in the lambing season, when the east wind blows and he needs shelter, is sure to have a scrap of newspaper with him to pore over in the hollow of the windy downs. In summer he reads in the shade of the firs while his sheep graze on the slope beneath. The little country stations are often not stations at all in the urban idea of such a convenience, being quite distant from any town, and merely gathering together the traffic from cross-roads. But the porters and men who work there at times get a good many newspapers, and these, after looking at them themselves, they take or send up to their relatives in the village five or six miles away. Everybody likes to tell another the news; and now that there is such a village demand for papers, to pass on a paper is like passing the news, and gives a pleasure to donor and recipient.

So that papers which in days gone by would have stopped where they first arrived now travel on and circulate. If you had given a cottager a newspaper a few years since he would have been silent and looked glum. If you give him one now he says, "Thank you," briskly. He and his read anything and everything; and as he walks beside the waggon he will pick up a scrap of newspaper from the roadside and pore over it as he goes. Girls in service send home papers from London; so do the lads when from home—and so many are away from home now. Papers come from Australia and America; the latter are especial favourites on account of the oddities with which the editors fill the corners. No one ever talks of the Continent in agricultural places; you hear nothing of France or Germany; nothing of Paris or Vienna, which are not so very distant in these days of railways, if distance be measured by miles. London and London news is familiar enough—they talk of London and of the United States or Australia, but particularly of the United States. The Continent does not exist to them; but the United States is a sort of second home, and the older men who have not gone sigh and say, "If I had 'a emigrated, now you see, I should 'a done well." There must be an immense increase in the number of papers passing through country post-offices. That the United States papers do come there is no doubt, for they are generally taken up by the cottage people to the farmhouses to show where the young fellows are who have left the place. But the remarkable fact is not in the increase of the papers, but in the growth of the desire to read them—the demand of the country for something to read.

In cottages of the better sort years ago you used to find the most formal of old prints or coloured pictures on the walls, stiff as buckram, unreal, badly executed, and not always decent. The favourites now are cuttings from the Illustrated London News or the Graphic, with pictures from which many cottages in the farthest away of the far country are hung round. Now and then one may be entered which is perfectly papered with such illustrations. These pictures in themselves play no inconsiderable part in educating the young, whose eyes become accustomed to correct representations of scenes in distant places, and who learn as much about such places and things as they could do without personally going. Besides which, the picture being found there is evidence that at fourth or fifth, or it may be the tenth hand, the paper itself must have got there, and if it got there it was read.

The local press has certainly trebled in recent times, as may be learned by reference to any newspaper list and looking at the dates. The export, so to say, of type, machines, rollers, and the material of printing from London to little country places has equally grown. Now, these are not sent out for nothing, but are in effect paid for by the pennies collected in the crooked lanes and byways of rural districts. Besides the numerous new papers, there are the old-established ones whose circulation has enlarged. Altogether, the growth of the local country press is as remarkable in its way as was the expansion of the London press after the removal of the newspaper stamp. This is conclusive evidence of the desire to read, for a paper is a thing unsaleable unless some one wants to read it. They are for the most part weeklies, and their primary object is the collection of local information; but they one and all have excerpts from London publications, often very well selected, and quite amusing if casually caught up by persons who may have fancied they knew something of London, current gossip, and the world at large. For you must go from home to learn the news; and if you go into a remote hamlet and take up the local paper you are extremely likely to light on some paragraph skilfully culled which will make an impression on you. It is with these excerpts that the present argument is chiefly concerned, the point being that they are important influences in the spread of general information. After the local gossip has been looked at the purchasers of these prints are sure to turn to these pieces, which serve them and theirs the most of the week to absorb.