There are
military
schools.
Macaulay
The one
business of Government is to handcuff, and lock up, and scourge, and
shoot, and stab, and strangle. It is odious tyranny in a government to
attempt to prevent crime by informing the understanding and elevating
the moral feeling of a people. A statesman may see hamlets turned, in
the course of one generation, into great seaport towns and manufacturing
towns. He may know that on the character of the vast population which is
collected in those wonderful towns, depends the prosperity, the peace,
the very existence of society. But he must not think of forming that
character. He is an enemy of public liberty if he attempts to prevent
those hundreds of thousands of his countrymen from becoming mere Yahoos.
He may, indeed, build barrack after barrack to overawe them. If they
break out into insurrection, he may send cavalry to sabre them: he may
mow them down with grape shot: he may hang them, draw them, quarter
them, anything but teach them. He may see, and may shudder as he sees,
throughout large rural districts, millions of infants growing up from
infancy to manhood as ignorant, as mere slaves of sensual appetite, as
the beasts that perish. No matter. He is a traitor to the cause of civil
and religious freedom if he does not look on with folded arms, while
absurd hopes and evil passions ripen in that rank soil. He must wait for
the day of his harvest. He must wait till the Jaquerie comes, till farm
houses are burning, till threshing machines are broken in pieces; and
then begins his business, which is simply to send one poor ignorant
savage to the county gaol, and another to the antipodes, and a third to
the gallows.
Such, Sir, is the new theory of government which was first propounded,
in the year 1846, by some men of high note among the Nonconformists of
England. It is difficult to understand how men of excellent abilities
and excellent intentions--and there are, I readily admit, such men
among those who hold this theory--can have fallen into so absurd and
pernicious an error. One explanation only occurs to me. This is, I am
inclined to believe, an instance of the operation of the great law of
reaction. We have just come victorious out of a long and fierce contest
for the liberty of trade. While that contest was undecided, much was
said and written about the advantages of free competition, and about the
danger of suffering the State to regulate matters which should be left
to individuals. There has consequently arisen in the minds of persons
who are led by words, and who are little in the habit of making
distinctions, a disposition to apply to political questions and moral
questions principles which are sound only when applied to commercial
questions. These people, not content with having forced the Government
to surrender a province wrongfully usurped, now wish to wrest from the
Government a domain held by a right which was never before questioned,
and which cannot be questioned with the smallest show of reason. "If,"
they say, "free competition is a good thing in trade, it must surely be
a good thing in education. The supply of other commodities, of sugar,
for example, is left to adjust itself to the demand; and the consequence
is, that we are better supplied with sugar than if the Government
undertook to supply us. Why then should we doubt that the supply of
instruction will, without the intervention of the Government, be found
equal to the demand? "
Never was there a more false analogy. Whether a man is well supplied
with sugar is a matter which concerns himself alone. But whether he is
well supplied with instruction is a matter which concerns his neighbours
and the State. If he cannot afford to pay for sugar, he must go without
sugar. But it is by no means fit that, because he cannot afford to pay
for education, he should go without education. Between the rich and
their instructors there may, as Adam Smith says, be free trade. The
supply of music masters and Italian masters may be left to adjust itself
to the demand. But what is to become of the millions who are too poor
to procure without assistance the services of a decent schoolmaster? We
have indeed heard it said that even these millions will be supplied with
teachers by the free competition of benevolent individuals who will vie
with each other in rendering this service to mankind. No doubt there are
many benevolent individuals who spend their time and money most laudably
in setting up and supporting schools; and you may say, if you please,
that there is, among these respectable persons, a competition to do
good. But do not be imposed upon by words. Do not believe that this
competition resembles the competition which is produced by the desire of
wealth and by the fear of ruin. There is a great difference, be assured,
between the rivalry of philanthropists and the rivalry of grocers. The
grocer knows that, if his wares are worse than those of other grocers,
he shall soon go before the Bankrupt Court, and his wife and children
will have no refuge but the workhouse: he knows that, if his shop
obtains an honourable celebrity, he shall be able to set up a carriage
and buy a villa: and this knowledge impels him to exertions compared
with which the exertions of even very charitable people to serve
the poor are but languid. It would be strange infatuation indeed to
legislate on the supposition that a man cares for his fellow creatures
as much as he cares for himself.
Unless, Sir, I greatly deceive myself, those arguments, which show
that the Government ought not to leave to private people the task
of providing for the national defence, will equally show that the
Government ought not to leave to private people the task of providing
for national education. On this subject, Mr Hume has laid down the
general law with admirable good sense and perspicuity. I mean David
Hume, not the Member for Montrose, though that honourable gentleman
will, I am confident, assent to the doctrine propounded by his
illustrious namesake. David Hume, Sir, justly says that most of the
arts and trades which exist in the world produce so much advantage and
pleasure to individuals, that the magistrate may safely leave it to
individuals to encourage those arts and trades. But he adds that there
are callings which, though they are highly useful, nay, absolutely
necessary to society, yet do not administer to the peculiar pleasure
or profit of any individual. The military calling is an instance. Here,
says Hume, the Government must interfere. It must take on itself to
regulate these callings, and to stimulate the industry of the persons
who follow these callings by pecuniary and honorary rewards.
Now, Sir, it seems to me that, on the same principle on which Government
ought to superintend and to reward the soldier, Government ought to
superintend and to reward the schoolmaster. I mean, of course, the
schoolmaster of the common people. That his calling is useful, that his
calling is necessary, will hardly be denied. Yet it is clear that
his services will not be adequately remunerated if he is left to be
remunerated by those whom he teaches, or by the voluntary contributions
of the charitable. Is this disputed? Look at the facts. You tell us that
schools will multiply and flourish exceedingly, if the Government will
only abstain from interfering with them. Has not the Government long
abstained from interfering with them? Has not everything been left,
through many years, to individual exertion? If it were true that
education, like trade, thrives most where the magistrate meddles least,
the common people of England would now be the best educated in the
world. Our schools would be model schools. Every one would have a well
chosen little library, excellent maps, a small but neat apparatus for
experiments in natural philosophy. A grown person unable to read and
write would be pointed at like Giant O'Brien or the Polish Count.
Our schoolmasters would be as eminently expert in all that relates to
teaching as our cutlers, our cotton-spinners, our engineers are allowed
to be in their respective callings. They would, as a class, be held in
high consideration; and their gains would be such that it would be
easy to find men of respectable character and attainments to fill up
vacancies.
Now, is this the case? Look at the charges of the judges, at the
resolutions of the grand juries, at the reports of public officers,
at the reports of voluntary associations. All tell the same sad and
ignominious story. Take the reports of the Inspectors of Prisons. In
the House of Correction at Hertford, of seven hundred prisoners one half
could not read at all; only eight could read and write well. Of eight
thousand prisoners who had passed through Maidstone Gaol only fifty
could read and write well. In Coldbath Fields Prison, the proportion
that could read and write well seems to have been still smaller. Turn
from the registers of prisoners to the registers of marriages. You will
find that about a hundred and thirty thousand couples were married in
the year 1844. More than forty thousand of the bridegrooms and more than
sixty thousand of the brides did not sign their names, but made their
marks. Nearly one third of the men and nearly one half of the women, who
are in the prime of life, who are to be the parents of the Englishmen of
the next generation, who are to bear a chief part in forming the minds
of the Englishmen of the next generation, cannot write their own names.
Remember, too, that, though people who cannot write their own names must
be grossly ignorant, people may write their own names and yet have very
little knowledge. Tens of thousands who were able to write their names
had in all probability received only the wretched education of a common
day school. We know what such a school too often is; a room crusted with
filth, without light, without air, with a heap of fuel in one corner
and a brood of chickens in another; the only machinery of instruction a
dogeared spelling-book and a broken slate; the masters the refuse of all
other callings, discarded footmen, ruined pedlars, men who cannot work
a sum in the rule of three, men who cannot write a common letter without
blunders, men who do not know whether the earth is a sphere or a cube,
men who do not know whether Jerusalem is in Asia or America. And to such
men, men to whom none of us would entrust the key of his cellar, we have
entrusted the mind of the rising generation, and, with the mind of the
rising generation the freedom, the happiness, the glory of our country.
Do you question the accuracy of this description? I will produce
evidence to which I am sure that you will not venture to take an
exception. Every gentleman here knows, I suppose, how important a
place the Congregational Union holds among the Nonconformists, and
how prominent a part Mr Edward Baines has taken in opposition to State
education. A Committee of the Congregational Union drew up last year
a report on the subject of education. That report was received by the
Union; and the person who moved that it should be received was Mr
Edward Baines. That report contains the following passage: "If it were
necessary to disclose facts to such an assembly as this, as to the
ignorance and debasement of the neglected portions of our population in
towns and rural districts, both adult and juvenile, it could easily
be done. Private information communicated to the Board, personal
observation and investigation of the various localities, with the
published documents of the Registrar General, and the reports of the
state of prisons in England and Wales, published by order of the House
of Commons, would furnish enough to make us modest in speaking of what
has been done for the humbler classes, and make us ashamed that the sons
of the soil of England should have been so long neglected, and should
present to the enlightened traveller from other shores such a sad
spectacle of neglected cultivation, lost mental power, and spiritual
degradation. " Nothing can be more just. All the information which I
have been able to obtain bears out the statements of the Congregational
Union. I do believe that the ignorance and degradation of a large
part of the community to which we belong ought to make us ashamed of
ourselves. I do believe that an enlightened traveller from New York,
from Geneva, or from Berlin, would be shocked to see so much barbarism
in the close neighbourhood of so much wealth and civilisation. But is
it not strange that the very gentlemen who tell us in such emphatic
language that the people are shamefully ill-educated, should yet persist
in telling us that under a system of free competition the people are
certain to be excellently educated? Only this morning the opponents of
our plan circulated a paper in which they confidently predict that free
competition will do all that is necessary, if we will only wait with
patience. Wait with patience! Why, we have been waiting ever since the
Heptarchy. How much longer are we to wait? Till the year 2847? Or till
the year 3847? That the experiment has as yet failed you do not deny.
And why should it have failed? Has it been tried in unfavourable
circumstances? Not so: it has been tried in the richest and in the
freest, and in the most charitable country in all Europe. Has it been
tried on too small a scale? Not so: millions have been subjected to it.
Has it been tried during too short a time? Not so: it has been going on
during ages. The cause of the failure then is plain. Our whole system
has been unsound. We have applied the principle of free competition to a
case to which that principle is not applicable.
But, Sir, if the state of the southern part of our island has furnished
me with one strong argument, the state of the northern part furnishes
me with another argument, which is, if possible, still more decisive.
A hundred and fifty years ago England was one of the best governed and
most prosperous countries in the world: Scotland was perhaps the rudest
and poorest country that could lay any claim to civilisation. The name
of Scotchman was then uttered in this part of the island with contempt.
The ablest Scotch statesmen contemplated the degraded state of
their poorer countrymen with a feeling approaching to despair. It is
well-known that Fletcher of Saltoun, a brave and accomplished man, a man
who had drawn his sword for liberty, who had suffered proscription and
exile for liberty, was so much disgusted and dismayed by the misery, the
ignorance, the idleness, the lawlessness of the common people, that he
proposed to make many thousands of them slaves. Nothing, he thought, but
the discipline which kept order and enforced exertion among the negroes
of a sugar colony, nothing but the lash and the stocks, could reclaim
the vagabonds who infested every part of Scotland from their indolent
and predatory habits, and compel them to support themselves by steady
labour. He therefore, soon after the Revolution, published a pamphlet,
in which he earnestly, and, as I believe, from the mere impulse of
humanity and patriotism, recommended to the Estates of the Realm this
sharp remedy, which alone, as he conceived, could remove the evil.
Within a few months after the publication of that pamphlet a very
different remedy was applied. The Parliament which sate at Edinburgh
passed an act for the establishment of parochial schools. What followed?
An improvement such as the world had never seen took place in the moral
and intellectual character of the people. Soon, in spite of the rigour
of the climate, in spite of the sterility of the earth, Scotland became
a country which had no reason to envy the fairest portions of the globe.
Wherever the Scotchman went,--and there were few parts of the world to
which he did not go,--he carried his superiority with him. If he was
admitted into a public office, he worked his way up to the highest post.
If he got employment in a brewery or a factory, he was soon the foreman.
If he took a shop, his trade was the best in the street. If he enlisted
in the army, he became a colour-sergeant. If he went to a colony, he
was the most thriving planter there. The Scotchman of the seventeenth
century had been spoken of in London as we speak of the Esquimaux. The
Scotchman of the eighteenth century was an object, not of scorn, but of
envy. The cry was that, wherever he came, he got more than his share;
that, mixed with Englishmen or mixed with Irishmen, he rose to the top
as surely as oil rises to the top of water. And what had produced this
great revolution? The Scotch air was still as cold, the Scotch rocks
were still as bare as ever. All the natural qualities of the Scotchman
were still what they had been when learned and benevolent men advised
that he should be flogged, like a beast of burden, to his daily task.
But the State had given him an education. That education was not, it is
true, in all respects what it should have been. But such as it was, it
had done more for the bleak and dreary shores of the Forth and the Clyde
than the richest of soils and the most genial of climates had done for
Capua and Tarentum. Is there one member of this House, however strongly
he may hold the doctrine that the Government ought not to interfere
with the education of the people, who will stand up and say that, in his
opinion, the Scotch would now have been a happier and a more enlightened
people if they had been left, during the last five generations, to find
instruction for themselves?
I say then, Sir, that, if the science of Government be an experimental
science, this question is decided. We are in a condition to perform the
inductive process according to the rules laid down in the Novum Organum.
We have two nations closely connected, inhabiting the same island,
sprung from the same blood, speaking the same language, governed by the
same Sovereign and the same Legislature, holding essentially the same
religious faith, having the same allies and the same enemies. Of these
two nations one was, a hundred and fifty years ago, as respects opulence
and civilisation, in the highest rank among European communities, the
other in the lowest rank. The opulent and highly civilised nation leaves
the education of the people to free competition. In the poor and half
barbarous nation the education of the people is undertaken by the State.
The result is that the first are last and the last first. The common
people of Scotland,--it is vain to disguise the truth,--have passed the
common people of England. Free competition, tried with every advantage,
has produced effects of which, as the Congregational Union tells us,
we ought to be ashamed, and which must lower us in the opinion of every
intelligent foreigner. State education, tried under every disadvantage,
has produced an improvement to which it would be difficult to find a
parallel in any age or country. Such an experiment as this would be
regarded as conclusive in surgery or chemistry, and ought, I think, to
be regarded as equally conclusive in politics.
These, Sir, are the reasons which have satisfied me that it is the
duty of the State to educate the people. Being firmly convinced of that
truth, I shall not shrink from proclaiming it here and elsewhere, in
defiance of the loudest clamour that agitators can raise. The remainder
of my task is easy. For, if the great principle for which I have been
contending is admitted, the objections which have been made to the
details of our plan will vanish fast. I will deal with those objections
in the order in which they stand in the amendment moved by the
honourable Member for Finsbury.
First among his objections he places the cost. Surely, Sir, no person
who admits that it is our duty to train the minds of the rising
generation can think a hundred thousand pounds too large a sum for that
purpose. If we look at the matter in the lowest point of view, if we
consider human beings merely as producers of wealth, the difference
between an intelligent and a stupid population, estimated in pounds,
shillings, and pence, exceeds a hundredfold the proposed outlay. Nor
is this all. For every pound that you save in education, you will spend
five in prosecutions, in prisons, in penal settlements. I cannot believe
that the House, having never grudged anything that was asked for the
purpose of maintaining order and protecting property by means of pain
and fear, will begin to be niggardly as soon as it is proposed to effect
the same objects by making the people wiser and better.
The next objection made by the honourable Member to our plan is that it
will increase the influence of the Crown. This sum of a hundred thousand
pounds may, he apprehends, be employed in corruption and jobbing. Those
schoolmasters who vote for ministerial candidates will obtain a share
of the grant: those schoolmasters who vote for opponents of the ministry
will apply for assistance in vain. Sir, the honourable Member never
would have made this objection if he had taken the trouble to understand
the minutes which he has condemned. We propose to place this part of
the public expenditure under checks which must make such abuses as the
honourable Member anticipates morally impossible. Not only will there
be those ordinary checks which are thought sufficient to prevent the
misapplication of the many millions annually granted for the army, the
navy, the ordnance, the civil government: not only must the Ministers of
the Crown come every year to this House for a vote, and be prepared to
render an account of the manner in which they have laid out what had
been voted in the preceding year, but, when they have satisfied the
House, when they have got their vote, they will still be unable to
distribute the money at their discretion. Whatever they may do for any
schoolmaster must be done in concert with those persons who, in the
district where the schoolmaster lives, take an interest in education,
and contribute out of their private means to the expense of education.
When the honourable gentleman is afraid that we shall corrupt
the schoolmasters, he forgets, first, that we do not appoint the
schoolmasters; secondly, that we cannot dismiss the schoolmasters;
thirdly, that managers who are altogether independent of us can, without
our consent, dismiss the schoolmasters; and, fourthly, that without
the recommendation of those managers we can give nothing to the
schoolmasters. Observe, too, that such a recommendation will not be one
of those recommendations which goodnatured easy people are too apt
to give to everybody who asks; nor will it at all resemble those
recommendations which the Secretary of the Treasury is in the habit of
receiving. For every pound which we pay on the recommendation of the
managers, the managers themselves must pay two pounds. They must also
provide the schoolmaster with a house out of their own funds before they
can obtain for him a grant from the public funds. What chance of jobbing
is there here? It is common enough, no doubt, for a Member of Parliament
who votes with Government to ask that one of those who zealously
supported him at the last election may have a place in the Excise or
the Customs. But such a member would soon cease to solicit if the answer
were, "Your friend shall have a place of fifty pounds a year, if you
will give him a house and settle on him an income of a hundred a year. "
What chance then, I again ask, is there of jobbing? What, say some of
the dissenters of Leeds, is to prevent a Tory Government, a High
Church Government, from using this parliamentary grant to corrupt
the schoolmasters of our borough, and to induce them to use all their
influence in favour of a Tory and High Church candidate? Why, Sir, the
dissenters of Leeds themselves have the power to prevent it. Let them
subscribe to the schools: let them take a share in the management of the
schools: let them refuse to recommend to the committee of Council any
schoolmaster whom they suspect of having voted at any election from
corrupt motives: and the thing is done. Our plan, in truth, is made
up of checks. My only doubt is whether the checks may not be found too
numerous and too stringent. On our general conduct there is the ordinary
check, the parliamentary check. And, as respects those minute details
which it is impossible that this House can investigate, we shall be
checked, in every town and in every rural district, by boards consisting
of independent men zealous in the cause of education.
The truth is, Sir, that those who clamour most loudly against our plan,
have never thought of ascertaining what it is. I see that a gentleman,
who ought to have known better, has not been ashamed publicly to tell
the world that our plan will cost the nation two millions a year, and
will paralyse all the exertions of individuals to educate the people.
These two assertions are uttered in one breath. And yet, if he who made
them had read our minutes before he railed at them, he would have
seen that his predictions are contradictory; that they cannot both be
fulfilled; that, if individuals do not exert themselves, the country
will have to pay nothing; and that, if the country has to pay two
millions, it will be because individuals have exerted themselves with
such wonderful, such incredible vigour, as to raise four millions by
voluntary contributions.
The next objection made by the honourable Member for Finsbury is that we
have acted unconstitutionally, and have encroached on the functions of
Parliament. The Committee of Council he seems to consider as an unlawful
assembly. He calls it sometimes a self-elected body and sometimes a
self-appointed body. Sir, these are words without meaning. The Committee
is no more a self-elected body than the Board of Trade. It is a body
appointed by the Queen; and in appointing it Her Majesty has exercised,
under the advice of her responsible Ministers, a prerogative as old as
the monarchy. But, says the honourable Member, the constitutional course
would have been to apply for an Act of Parliament. On what ground?
Nothing but an Act of Parliament can legalise that which is illegal.
But whoever heard of an Act of Parliament to legalise what was already
beyond all dispute legal? Of course, if we wished to send aliens out
of the country, or to retain disaffected persons in custody without
bringing them to trial, we must obtain an Act of Parliament empowering
us to do so. But why should we ask for an Act of Parliament to empower
us to do what anybody may do, what the honourable Member for Finsbury
may do? Is there any doubt that he or anybody else may subscribe to a
school, give a stipend to a monitor, or settle a retiring pension on a
preceptor who has done good service? What any of the Queen's subjects
may do the Queen may do. Suppose that her privy purse were so large that
she could afford to employ a hundred thousand pounds in this beneficent
manner; would an Act of Parliament be necessary to enable her to do so?
Every part of our plan may lawfully be carried into execution by any
person, Sovereign or subject, who has the inclination and the money.
We have not the money; and for the money we come, in a strictly
constitutional manner, to the House of Commons. The course which we
have taken is in conformity with all precedent, as well as with
all principle.
There are military schools. No Act of Parliament was
necessary to authorise the establishing of such schools. All that
was necessary was a grant of money to defray the charge. When I was
Secretary at War it was my duty to bring under Her Majesty's notice the
situation of the female children of her soldiers. Many such children
accompanied every regiment, and their education was grievously
neglected. Her Majesty was graciously pleased to sign a warrant by which
a girls' school was attached to each corps. No Act of Parliament was
necessary. For to set up a school where girls might be taught to read,
and write, and sew, and cook, was perfectly legal already. I might have
set it up myself, if I had been rich enough. All that I had to ask from
Parliament was the money. But I ought to beg pardon for arguing a point
so clear.
The next objection to our plans is that they interfere with the
religious convictions of Her Majesty's subjects. It has been sometimes
insinuated, but it has never been proved, that the Committee of Council
has shown undue favour to the Established Church. Sir, I have carefully
read and considered the minutes; and I wish that every man who has
exerted his eloquence against them had done the same. I say that I have
carefully read and considered them, and that they seem to me to have
been drawn up with exemplary impartiality. The benefits which we offer
we offer to people of all religious persuasions alike. The dissenting
managers of schools will have equal authority with the managers who
belong to the Church. A boy who goes to meeting will be just as eligible
to be a monitor, and will receive just as large a stipend, as if he
went to the cathedral. The schoolmaster who is a nonconformist and the
schoolmaster who is a conformist will enjoy the same emoluments, and
will, after the same term of service, obtain, on the same conditions,
the same retiring pension. I wish that some gentleman would, instead
of using vague phrases about religious liberty and the rights of
conscience, answer this plain question. Suppose that in one of our large
towns there are four schools, a school connected with the Church, a
school connected with the Independents, a Baptist school, and a Wesleyan
school; what encouragement, pecuniary or honorary, will, by our plan, be
given to the school connected with the Church, and withheld from any of
the other three schools? Is it not indeed plain that, if by neglect or
maladministration the Church school should get into a bad state, while
the dissenting schools flourish, the dissenting schools will receive
public money and the Church school will receive none?
It is true, I admit, that in rural districts which are too poor to
support more than one school, the religious community to which
the majority belongs will have an advantage over other religious
communities. But this is not our fault. If we are as impartial as it
is possible to be, you surely do not expect more. If there should be a
parish containing nine hundred churchmen and a hundred dissenters, if
there should, in that parish, be a school connected with the Church,
if the dissenters in that parish should be too poor to set up another
school, undoubtedly the school connected with the Church will, in that
parish, get all that we give; and the dissenters will get nothing. But
observe that there is no partiality to the Church, as the Church, in
this arrangement. The churchmen get public money, not because they
are churchmen, but because they are the majority. The dissenters get
nothing, not because they are dissenters, but because they are a small
minority. There are districts where the case will be reversed, where
there will be dissenting schools, and no Church schools. In such cases
the dissenters will get what we have to give, and the churchmen will get
nothing.
But, Sir, I ought not to say that a churchman gets nothing by a system
which gives a good education to dissenters, or that a dissenter gets
nothing by a system which gives a good education to churchmen. We are
not, I hope, so much conformists, or so much nonconformists, as to
forget that we are Englishmen and Christians. We all, Churchmen,
Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, Methodists, have an interest in
this, that the great body of the people should be rescued from ignorance
and barbarism. I mentioned Lord George Gordon's mob. That mob began,
it is true, with the Roman Catholics: but, long before the tumults were
over, there was not a respectable Protestant in London who was not in
fear for his house, for his limbs, for his life, for the lives of those
who were dearest to him. The honourable Member for Finsbury says that we
call on men to pay for an education from which they derive no benefit.
I deny that there is one honest and industrious man in the country who
derives no benefit from living among honest and industrious neighbours
rather than among rioters and vagabonds. This matter is as much a matter
of common concern as the defence of our coast. Suppose that I were
to say, "Why do you tax me to fortify Portsmouth? If the people of
Portsmouth think that they cannot be safe without bastions and ravelins,
let the people of Portsmouth pay the engineers and masons. Why am I to
bear the charge of works from which I derive no advantage? " You would
answer, and most justly, that there is no man in the island who does
not derive advantage from these works, whether he resides within them or
not. And, as every man, in whatever part of the island he may live, is
bound to contribute to the support of those arsenals which are necessary
for our common security, so is every man, to whatever sect he may
belong, bound to contribute to the support of those schools on which,
not less than on our arsenals, our common security depends.
I now come to the last words of the amendment. The honourable Member
for Finsbury is apprehensive that our plan may interfere with the
civil rights of Her Majesty's subjects. How a man's civil rights can be
prejudiced by his learning to read and write, to multiply and divide, or
even by his obtaining some knowledge of history and geography, I do
not very well apprehend. One thing is clear, that persons sunk in that
ignorance in which, as we are assured by the Congregational Union, great
numbers of our countrymen are sunk, can be free only in name. It is
hardly necessary for us to appoint a Select Committee for the purpose of
inquiring whether knowledge be the ally or the enemy of liberty. He is,
I must say, but a short-sighted friend of the common people who is eager
to bestow on them a franchise which would make them all-powerful, and
yet would withhold from them that instruction without which their power
must be a curse to themselves and to the State.
This, Sir, is my defence. From the clamour of our accusers I appeal with
confidence to the country to which we must, in no long time, render
an account of our stewardship. I appeal with still more confidence
to future generations, which, while enjoying all the blessings of an
impartial and efficient system of public instruction, will find it
difficult to believe that the authors of that system should have had
to struggle with a vehement and pertinacious opposition, and still more
difficult to believe that such an opposition was offered in the name of
civil and religious freedom.
*****
INAUGURAL SPEECH AT GLASGOW COLLEGE. (MARCH 21, 1849) A SPEECH DELIVERED
AT THE COLLEGE OF GLASGOW ON THE 21ST OF MARCH, 1849.
At the election of Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, in
November, 1848, the votes stood thus: Mr Macaulay, 255; Colonel Mure,
203. The installation took place on the twenty-first of March, 1849;
and after that ceremony had been performed, the following Speech was
delivered.
My first duty, Gentlemen, is to return you my thanks for the honour
which you have conferred on me. You well know that it was wholly
unsolicited; and I can assure you that it was wholly unexpected. I
may add that, if I had been invited to become a candidate for your
suffrages, I should respectfully have declined the invitation. My
predecessor, whom I am so happy as to be able to call my friend,
declared from this place last year in language which well became him,
that he would not have come forward to displace so eminent a statesman
as Lord John Russell. I can with equal truth affirm that I would
not have come forward to displace so estimable a gentleman and so
accomplished a scholar as Colonel Mure. But Colonel Mure felt last
year that it was not for him, and I now feel that it is not for me,
to question the propriety of your decision on a point of which, by the
constitution of your body, you are the judges. I therefore gratefully
accept the office to which I have been called, fully purposing to use
whatever powers belong to it with a single view to the welfare and
credit of your society.
I am not using a mere phrase of course, when I say that the feelings
with which I bear apart in the ceremony of this day are such as I find
it difficult to utter in words. I do not think it strange that, when
that great master of eloquence, Edmund Burke, stood where I now stand,
he faltered and remained mute. Doubtless the multitude of thoughts which
rushed into his mind was such as even he could not easily arrange or
express. In truth there are few spectacles more striking or affecting
than that which a great historical place of education presents on a
solemn public day. There is something strangely interesting in the
contrast between the venerable antiquity of the body and the fresh and
ardent youth of the great majority of the members. Recollections and
hopes crowd upon us together. The past and the future are at once
brought close to us. Our thoughts wander back to the time when the
foundations of this ancient building were laid, and forward to the
time when those whom it is our office to guide and to teach will be the
guides and teachers of our posterity. On the present occasion we may,
with peculiar propriety, give such thoughts their course. For it has
chanced that my magistracy has fallen on a great secular epoch. This
is the four hundredth year of the existence of your University. At such
jubilees, jubilees of which no individual sees more than one, it is
natural, and it is good, that a society like this, a society which
survives all the transitory parts of which it is composed, a society
which has a corporate existence and a perpetual succession, should
review its annals, should retrace the stages of its growth from infancy
to maturity, and should try to find, in the experience of generations
which have passed away, lessons which may be profitable to generations
yet unborn.
The retrospect is full of interest and instruction. Perhaps it may be
doubted whether, since the Christian era, there has been any point of
time more important to the highest interests of mankind than that at
which the existence of your University commenced. It was at the moment
of a great destruction and of a great creation. Your society was
instituted just before the empire of the East perished; that strange
empire which, dragging on a languid life through the great age of
darkness, connected together the two great ages of light; that empire
which, adding nothing to our stores of knowledge, and producing not one
man great in letters, in science, or in art, yet preserved, in the midst
of barbarism, those masterpieces of Attic genius, which the highest
minds still contemplate, and long will contemplate, with admiring
despair. And at that very time, while the fanatical Moslem were
plundering the churches and palaces of Constantinople, breaking in
pieces Grecian sculptures, and giving to the flames piles of Grecian
eloquence, a few humble German artisans, who little knew that they were
calling into existence a power far mightier than that of the victorious
Sultan, were busied in cutting and setting the first types. The
University came into existence just in time to witness the disappearance
of the last trace of the Roman empire, and to witness the publication of
the earliest printed book.
At this conjuncture, a conjuncture of unrivalled interest in the history
of letters, a man, never to be mentioned without reverence by every
lover of letters, held the highest place in Europe. Our just attachment
to that Protestant faith to which our country owes so much must not
prevent us from paying the tribute which, on this occasion, and in this
place, justice and gratitude demand, to the founder of the University
of Glasgow, the greatest of the restorers of learning, Pope Nicholas the
Fifth. He had sprung from the common people; but his abilities and his
erudition had early attracted the notice of the great. He had studied
much and travelled far. He had visited Britain, which, in wealth and
refinement, was to his native Tuscany what the back settlements of
America now are to Britain. He had lived with the merchant princes of
Florence, those men who first ennobled trade by making trade the ally
of philosophy, of eloquence, and of taste. It was he who, under the
protection of the munificent and discerning Cosmo, arranged the first
public library that Modern Europe possessed. From privacy your founder
rose to a throne; but on the throne he never forgot the studies which
had been his delight in privacy. He was the centre of an illustrious
group, composed partly of the last great scholars of Greece, and partly
of the first great scholars of Italy, Theodore Gaza and George
of Trebizond, Bessarion and Filelfo, Marsilio Ficino and Poggio
Bracciolini. By him was founded the Vatican library, then and long after
the most precious and the most extensive collection of books in the
world. By him were carefully preserved the most valuable intellectual
treasures which had been snatched from the wreck of the Byzantine
empire. His agents were to be found everywhere, in the bazaars of the
farthest East, in the monasteries of the farthest West, purchasing or
copying worm-eaten parchments, on which were traced words worthy of
immortality. Under his patronage were prepared accurate Latin versions
of many precious remains of Greek poets and philosophers. But no
department of literature owes so much to him as history. By him were
introduced to the knowledge of Western Europe two great and unrivalled
models of historical composition, the work of Herodotus and the work of
Thucydides. By him, too, our ancestors were first made acquainted with
the graceful and lucid simplicity of Xenophon and with the manly good
sense of Polybius.
It was while he was occupied with cares like these that his attention
was called to the intellectual wants of this region, a region now
swarming with population, rich with culture, and resounding with the
clang of machinery, a region which now sends forth fleets laden with its
admirable fabrics to the lands of which, in his days, no geographer had
ever heard, then a wild, a poor, a half barbarous tract, lying on the
utmost verge of the known world. He gave his sanction to the plan of
establishing a University at Glasgow, and bestowed on the new seat of
learning all the privileges which belonged to the University of Bologna.
I can conceive that a pitying smile passed over his face as he named
Bologna and Glasgow together. At Bologna he had long studied. No spot
in the world had been more favoured by nature or by art. The surrounding
country was a fruitful and sunny country, a country of cornfields and
vineyards. In the city, the house of Bentivoglo bore rule, a house which
vied with the house of Medici in taste and magnificence, which has
left to posterity noble palaces and temples, and which gave a splendid
patronage to arts and letters. Glasgow your founder just knew to be a
poor, a small, a rude town, a town, as he would have thought, not likely
ever to be great and opulent; for the soil, compared with the rich
country at the foot of the Apennines, was barren, and the climate was
such that an Italian shuddered at the thought of it. But it is not on
the fertility of the soil, it is not on the mildness of the atmosphere,
that the prosperity of nations chiefly depends. Slavery and superstition
can make Campania a land of beggars, and can change the plain of Enna
into a desert. Nor is it beyond the power of human intelligence and
energy, developed by civil and spiritual freedom, to turn sterile rocks
and pestilential marshes into cities and gardens. Enlightened as your
founder was, he little knew that he was himself a chief agent in a great
revolution, physical and moral, political and religious, in a revolution
destined to make the last first and the first last, in a revolution
destined to invert the relative positions of Glasgow and Bologna. We
cannot, I think, better employ a few minutes than in reviewing the
stages of this great change in human affairs.
The review shall be short. Indeed I cannot do better than pass rapidly
from century to century. Look at the world, then, a hundred years after
the seal of Nicholas had been affixed to the instrument which
called your College into existence. We find Europe, we find Scotland
especially, in the agonies of that great revolution which we
emphatically call the Reformation. The liberal patronage which
Nicholas, and men like Nicholas, had given to learning, and of which
the establishment of this seat of learning is not the least remarkable
instance, had produced an effect which they had never contemplated.
Ignorance was the talisman on which their power depended; and that
talisman they had themselves broken. They had called in Knowledge as a
handmaid to decorate Superstition, and their error produced its natural
effect. I need not tell you what a part the votaries of classical
learning, and especially the votaries of Greek learning, the Humanists,
as they were then called, bore in the great movement against spiritual
tyranny. They formed, in fact, the vanguard of that movement. Every
one of the chief Reformers--I do not at this moment remember a single
exception--was a Humanist. Almost every eminent Humanist in the north of
Europe was, according to the measure of his uprightness and courage, a
Reformer. In a Scottish University I need hardly mention the names of
Knox, of Buchanan, of Melville, of Secretary Maitland. In truth, minds
daily nourished with the best literature of Greece and Rome necessarily
grew too strong to be trammelled by the cobwebs of the scholastic
divinity; and the influence of such minds was now rapidly felt by the
whole community; for the invention of printing had brought books within
the reach even of yeomen and of artisans. From the Mediterranean to the
Frozen Sea, therefore, the public mind was everywhere in a ferment; and
nowhere was the ferment greater than in Scotland. It was in the midst
of martyrdoms and proscriptions, in the midst of a war between power
and truth, that the first century of the existence of your University
closed.
Pass another hundred years; and we are in the midst of another
revolution. The war between Popery and Protestantism had, in this
island, been terminated by the victory of Protestantism. But from that
war another war had sprung, the war between Prelacy and Puritanism.
The hostile religious sects were allied, intermingled, confounded with
hostile political parties. The monarchical element of the constitution
was an object of almost exclusive devotion to the Prelatist. The popular
element of the constitution was especially dear to the Puritan. At
length an appeal was made to the sword. Puritanism triumphed; but
Puritanism was already divided against itself. Independency and
Republicanism were on one side, Presbyterianism and limited Monarchy on
the other. It was in the very darkest part of that dark time, it was
in the midst of battles, sieges, and executions, it was when the whole
world was still aghast at the awful spectacle of a British King standing
before a judgment seat, and laying his neck on a block, it was when the
mangled remains of the Duke of Hamilton had just been laid in the tomb
of his house, it was when the head of the Marquess of Montrose had just
been fixed on the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, that your University completed
her second century.
A hundred years more; and we have at length reached the beginning of a
happier period. Our civil and religious liberties had indeed been bought
with a fearful price. But they had been bought. The price had been
paid. The last battle had been fought on British ground. The last black
scaffold had been set up on Tower Hill. The evil days were over. A
bright and tranquil century, a century of religious toleration, of
domestic peace, of temperate freedom, of equal justice, was beginning.
That century is now closing. When we compare it with any equally long
period in the history of any other great society, we shall find abundant
cause for thankfulness to the Giver of all good. Nor is there any place
in the whole kingdom better fitted to excite this feeling than the place
where we are now assembled. For in the whole kingdom we shall find no
district in which the progress of trade, of manufactures, of wealth,
and of the arts of life, has been more rapid than in Clydesdale. Your
University has partaken largely of the prosperity of this city and of
the surrounding region. The security, the tranquillity, the liberty,
which have been propitious to the industry of the merchant and of the
manufacturer, have been also propitious to the industry of the scholar.
To the last century belong most of the names of which you justly boast.
The time would fail me if I attempted to do justice to the memory of all
the illustrious men who, during that period, taught or learned wisdom
within these ancient walls; geometricians, anatomists, jurists,
philologists, metaphysicians, poets: Simpson and Hunter, Millar and
Young, Reid and Stewart; Campbell, whose coffin was lately borne to a
grave in that renowned transept which contains the dust of Chaucer,
of Spenser, and of Dryden; Black, whose discoveries form an era in the
history of chemical science; Adam Smith, the greatest of all the masters
of political science; James Watt, who perhaps did more than any single
man has done, since the New Atlantis of Bacon was written, to accomplish
that glorious prophecy. We now speak the language of humility when we
say that the University of Glasgow need not fear a comparison with the
University of Bologna.
A fifth secular period is about to commence. There is no lack of
alarmists who will tell you that it is about to commence under evil
auspices. But from me you must expect no such gloomy prognostications.
I have heard them too long and too constantly to be scared by them. Ever
since I began to make observations on the state of my country, I have
been seeing nothing but growth, and hearing of nothing but decay. The
more I contemplate our noble institutions, the more convinced I am that
they are sound at heart, that they have nothing of age but its dignity,
and that their strength is still the strength of youth. The hurricane,
which has recently overthrown so much that was great and that seemed
durable, has only proved their solidity. They still stand, august and
immovable, while dynasties and churches are lying in heaps of ruin all
around us. I see no reason to doubt that, by the blessing of God on
a wise and temperate policy, on a policy of which the principle is
to preserve what is good by reforming in time what is evil, our civil
institutions may be preserved unimpaired to a late posterity, and that,
under the shade of our civil institutions, our academical institutions
may long continue to flourish.
I trust, therefore, that, when a hundred years more have run out, this
ancient College will still continue to deserve well of our country and
of mankind. I trust that the installation of 1949 will be attended by a
still greater assembly of students than I have the happiness now to see
before me. That assemblage, indeed, may not meet in the place where we
have met. These venerable halls may have disappeared. My successor may
speak to your successors in a more stately edifice, in a edifice which,
even among the magnificent buildings of the future Glasgow, will still
be admired as a fine specimen of the architecture which flourished in
the days of the good Queen Victoria. But, though the site and the walls
may be new, the spirit of the institution will, I hope, be still the
same. My successor will, I hope, be able to boast that the fifth century
of the University has even been more glorious than the fourth. He will
be able to vindicate that boast by citing a long list of eminent men,
great masters of experimental science, of ancient learning, of our
native eloquence, ornaments of the senate, the pulpit and the bar. He
will, I hope, mention with high honour some of my young friends who now
hear me; and he will, I also hope, be able to add that their talents
and learning were not wasted on selfish or ignoble objects, but were
employed to promote the physical and moral good of their species, to
extend the empire of man over the material world, to defend the cause
of civil and religious liberty against tyrants and bigots, and to defend
the cause of virtue and order against the enemies of all divine and
human laws.
I have now given utterance to a part, and to a part only, of the
recollections and anticipations of which, on this solemn occasion, my
mind is full. I again thank you for the honour which you have bestowed
on me; and I assure you that, while I live, I shall never cease to take
a deep interest in the welfare and fame of the body with which, by your
kindness, I have this day become connected.
*****
RE-ELECTION TO PARLIAMENT. (NOVEMBER 2, 1852) A SPEECH DELIVERED AT
EDINBURGH ON THE 2D OF NOVEMBER, 1852.
At the General Election of 1852 the votes for the City of Edinburgh
stood thus:
Mr Macaulay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1872
Mr Cowan . . . . . . . . . . .
business of Government is to handcuff, and lock up, and scourge, and
shoot, and stab, and strangle. It is odious tyranny in a government to
attempt to prevent crime by informing the understanding and elevating
the moral feeling of a people. A statesman may see hamlets turned, in
the course of one generation, into great seaport towns and manufacturing
towns. He may know that on the character of the vast population which is
collected in those wonderful towns, depends the prosperity, the peace,
the very existence of society. But he must not think of forming that
character. He is an enemy of public liberty if he attempts to prevent
those hundreds of thousands of his countrymen from becoming mere Yahoos.
He may, indeed, build barrack after barrack to overawe them. If they
break out into insurrection, he may send cavalry to sabre them: he may
mow them down with grape shot: he may hang them, draw them, quarter
them, anything but teach them. He may see, and may shudder as he sees,
throughout large rural districts, millions of infants growing up from
infancy to manhood as ignorant, as mere slaves of sensual appetite, as
the beasts that perish. No matter. He is a traitor to the cause of civil
and religious freedom if he does not look on with folded arms, while
absurd hopes and evil passions ripen in that rank soil. He must wait for
the day of his harvest. He must wait till the Jaquerie comes, till farm
houses are burning, till threshing machines are broken in pieces; and
then begins his business, which is simply to send one poor ignorant
savage to the county gaol, and another to the antipodes, and a third to
the gallows.
Such, Sir, is the new theory of government which was first propounded,
in the year 1846, by some men of high note among the Nonconformists of
England. It is difficult to understand how men of excellent abilities
and excellent intentions--and there are, I readily admit, such men
among those who hold this theory--can have fallen into so absurd and
pernicious an error. One explanation only occurs to me. This is, I am
inclined to believe, an instance of the operation of the great law of
reaction. We have just come victorious out of a long and fierce contest
for the liberty of trade. While that contest was undecided, much was
said and written about the advantages of free competition, and about the
danger of suffering the State to regulate matters which should be left
to individuals. There has consequently arisen in the minds of persons
who are led by words, and who are little in the habit of making
distinctions, a disposition to apply to political questions and moral
questions principles which are sound only when applied to commercial
questions. These people, not content with having forced the Government
to surrender a province wrongfully usurped, now wish to wrest from the
Government a domain held by a right which was never before questioned,
and which cannot be questioned with the smallest show of reason. "If,"
they say, "free competition is a good thing in trade, it must surely be
a good thing in education. The supply of other commodities, of sugar,
for example, is left to adjust itself to the demand; and the consequence
is, that we are better supplied with sugar than if the Government
undertook to supply us. Why then should we doubt that the supply of
instruction will, without the intervention of the Government, be found
equal to the demand? "
Never was there a more false analogy. Whether a man is well supplied
with sugar is a matter which concerns himself alone. But whether he is
well supplied with instruction is a matter which concerns his neighbours
and the State. If he cannot afford to pay for sugar, he must go without
sugar. But it is by no means fit that, because he cannot afford to pay
for education, he should go without education. Between the rich and
their instructors there may, as Adam Smith says, be free trade. The
supply of music masters and Italian masters may be left to adjust itself
to the demand. But what is to become of the millions who are too poor
to procure without assistance the services of a decent schoolmaster? We
have indeed heard it said that even these millions will be supplied with
teachers by the free competition of benevolent individuals who will vie
with each other in rendering this service to mankind. No doubt there are
many benevolent individuals who spend their time and money most laudably
in setting up and supporting schools; and you may say, if you please,
that there is, among these respectable persons, a competition to do
good. But do not be imposed upon by words. Do not believe that this
competition resembles the competition which is produced by the desire of
wealth and by the fear of ruin. There is a great difference, be assured,
between the rivalry of philanthropists and the rivalry of grocers. The
grocer knows that, if his wares are worse than those of other grocers,
he shall soon go before the Bankrupt Court, and his wife and children
will have no refuge but the workhouse: he knows that, if his shop
obtains an honourable celebrity, he shall be able to set up a carriage
and buy a villa: and this knowledge impels him to exertions compared
with which the exertions of even very charitable people to serve
the poor are but languid. It would be strange infatuation indeed to
legislate on the supposition that a man cares for his fellow creatures
as much as he cares for himself.
Unless, Sir, I greatly deceive myself, those arguments, which show
that the Government ought not to leave to private people the task
of providing for the national defence, will equally show that the
Government ought not to leave to private people the task of providing
for national education. On this subject, Mr Hume has laid down the
general law with admirable good sense and perspicuity. I mean David
Hume, not the Member for Montrose, though that honourable gentleman
will, I am confident, assent to the doctrine propounded by his
illustrious namesake. David Hume, Sir, justly says that most of the
arts and trades which exist in the world produce so much advantage and
pleasure to individuals, that the magistrate may safely leave it to
individuals to encourage those arts and trades. But he adds that there
are callings which, though they are highly useful, nay, absolutely
necessary to society, yet do not administer to the peculiar pleasure
or profit of any individual. The military calling is an instance. Here,
says Hume, the Government must interfere. It must take on itself to
regulate these callings, and to stimulate the industry of the persons
who follow these callings by pecuniary and honorary rewards.
Now, Sir, it seems to me that, on the same principle on which Government
ought to superintend and to reward the soldier, Government ought to
superintend and to reward the schoolmaster. I mean, of course, the
schoolmaster of the common people. That his calling is useful, that his
calling is necessary, will hardly be denied. Yet it is clear that
his services will not be adequately remunerated if he is left to be
remunerated by those whom he teaches, or by the voluntary contributions
of the charitable. Is this disputed? Look at the facts. You tell us that
schools will multiply and flourish exceedingly, if the Government will
only abstain from interfering with them. Has not the Government long
abstained from interfering with them? Has not everything been left,
through many years, to individual exertion? If it were true that
education, like trade, thrives most where the magistrate meddles least,
the common people of England would now be the best educated in the
world. Our schools would be model schools. Every one would have a well
chosen little library, excellent maps, a small but neat apparatus for
experiments in natural philosophy. A grown person unable to read and
write would be pointed at like Giant O'Brien or the Polish Count.
Our schoolmasters would be as eminently expert in all that relates to
teaching as our cutlers, our cotton-spinners, our engineers are allowed
to be in their respective callings. They would, as a class, be held in
high consideration; and their gains would be such that it would be
easy to find men of respectable character and attainments to fill up
vacancies.
Now, is this the case? Look at the charges of the judges, at the
resolutions of the grand juries, at the reports of public officers,
at the reports of voluntary associations. All tell the same sad and
ignominious story. Take the reports of the Inspectors of Prisons. In
the House of Correction at Hertford, of seven hundred prisoners one half
could not read at all; only eight could read and write well. Of eight
thousand prisoners who had passed through Maidstone Gaol only fifty
could read and write well. In Coldbath Fields Prison, the proportion
that could read and write well seems to have been still smaller. Turn
from the registers of prisoners to the registers of marriages. You will
find that about a hundred and thirty thousand couples were married in
the year 1844. More than forty thousand of the bridegrooms and more than
sixty thousand of the brides did not sign their names, but made their
marks. Nearly one third of the men and nearly one half of the women, who
are in the prime of life, who are to be the parents of the Englishmen of
the next generation, who are to bear a chief part in forming the minds
of the Englishmen of the next generation, cannot write their own names.
Remember, too, that, though people who cannot write their own names must
be grossly ignorant, people may write their own names and yet have very
little knowledge. Tens of thousands who were able to write their names
had in all probability received only the wretched education of a common
day school. We know what such a school too often is; a room crusted with
filth, without light, without air, with a heap of fuel in one corner
and a brood of chickens in another; the only machinery of instruction a
dogeared spelling-book and a broken slate; the masters the refuse of all
other callings, discarded footmen, ruined pedlars, men who cannot work
a sum in the rule of three, men who cannot write a common letter without
blunders, men who do not know whether the earth is a sphere or a cube,
men who do not know whether Jerusalem is in Asia or America. And to such
men, men to whom none of us would entrust the key of his cellar, we have
entrusted the mind of the rising generation, and, with the mind of the
rising generation the freedom, the happiness, the glory of our country.
Do you question the accuracy of this description? I will produce
evidence to which I am sure that you will not venture to take an
exception. Every gentleman here knows, I suppose, how important a
place the Congregational Union holds among the Nonconformists, and
how prominent a part Mr Edward Baines has taken in opposition to State
education. A Committee of the Congregational Union drew up last year
a report on the subject of education. That report was received by the
Union; and the person who moved that it should be received was Mr
Edward Baines. That report contains the following passage: "If it were
necessary to disclose facts to such an assembly as this, as to the
ignorance and debasement of the neglected portions of our population in
towns and rural districts, both adult and juvenile, it could easily
be done. Private information communicated to the Board, personal
observation and investigation of the various localities, with the
published documents of the Registrar General, and the reports of the
state of prisons in England and Wales, published by order of the House
of Commons, would furnish enough to make us modest in speaking of what
has been done for the humbler classes, and make us ashamed that the sons
of the soil of England should have been so long neglected, and should
present to the enlightened traveller from other shores such a sad
spectacle of neglected cultivation, lost mental power, and spiritual
degradation. " Nothing can be more just. All the information which I
have been able to obtain bears out the statements of the Congregational
Union. I do believe that the ignorance and degradation of a large
part of the community to which we belong ought to make us ashamed of
ourselves. I do believe that an enlightened traveller from New York,
from Geneva, or from Berlin, would be shocked to see so much barbarism
in the close neighbourhood of so much wealth and civilisation. But is
it not strange that the very gentlemen who tell us in such emphatic
language that the people are shamefully ill-educated, should yet persist
in telling us that under a system of free competition the people are
certain to be excellently educated? Only this morning the opponents of
our plan circulated a paper in which they confidently predict that free
competition will do all that is necessary, if we will only wait with
patience. Wait with patience! Why, we have been waiting ever since the
Heptarchy. How much longer are we to wait? Till the year 2847? Or till
the year 3847? That the experiment has as yet failed you do not deny.
And why should it have failed? Has it been tried in unfavourable
circumstances? Not so: it has been tried in the richest and in the
freest, and in the most charitable country in all Europe. Has it been
tried on too small a scale? Not so: millions have been subjected to it.
Has it been tried during too short a time? Not so: it has been going on
during ages. The cause of the failure then is plain. Our whole system
has been unsound. We have applied the principle of free competition to a
case to which that principle is not applicable.
But, Sir, if the state of the southern part of our island has furnished
me with one strong argument, the state of the northern part furnishes
me with another argument, which is, if possible, still more decisive.
A hundred and fifty years ago England was one of the best governed and
most prosperous countries in the world: Scotland was perhaps the rudest
and poorest country that could lay any claim to civilisation. The name
of Scotchman was then uttered in this part of the island with contempt.
The ablest Scotch statesmen contemplated the degraded state of
their poorer countrymen with a feeling approaching to despair. It is
well-known that Fletcher of Saltoun, a brave and accomplished man, a man
who had drawn his sword for liberty, who had suffered proscription and
exile for liberty, was so much disgusted and dismayed by the misery, the
ignorance, the idleness, the lawlessness of the common people, that he
proposed to make many thousands of them slaves. Nothing, he thought, but
the discipline which kept order and enforced exertion among the negroes
of a sugar colony, nothing but the lash and the stocks, could reclaim
the vagabonds who infested every part of Scotland from their indolent
and predatory habits, and compel them to support themselves by steady
labour. He therefore, soon after the Revolution, published a pamphlet,
in which he earnestly, and, as I believe, from the mere impulse of
humanity and patriotism, recommended to the Estates of the Realm this
sharp remedy, which alone, as he conceived, could remove the evil.
Within a few months after the publication of that pamphlet a very
different remedy was applied. The Parliament which sate at Edinburgh
passed an act for the establishment of parochial schools. What followed?
An improvement such as the world had never seen took place in the moral
and intellectual character of the people. Soon, in spite of the rigour
of the climate, in spite of the sterility of the earth, Scotland became
a country which had no reason to envy the fairest portions of the globe.
Wherever the Scotchman went,--and there were few parts of the world to
which he did not go,--he carried his superiority with him. If he was
admitted into a public office, he worked his way up to the highest post.
If he got employment in a brewery or a factory, he was soon the foreman.
If he took a shop, his trade was the best in the street. If he enlisted
in the army, he became a colour-sergeant. If he went to a colony, he
was the most thriving planter there. The Scotchman of the seventeenth
century had been spoken of in London as we speak of the Esquimaux. The
Scotchman of the eighteenth century was an object, not of scorn, but of
envy. The cry was that, wherever he came, he got more than his share;
that, mixed with Englishmen or mixed with Irishmen, he rose to the top
as surely as oil rises to the top of water. And what had produced this
great revolution? The Scotch air was still as cold, the Scotch rocks
were still as bare as ever. All the natural qualities of the Scotchman
were still what they had been when learned and benevolent men advised
that he should be flogged, like a beast of burden, to his daily task.
But the State had given him an education. That education was not, it is
true, in all respects what it should have been. But such as it was, it
had done more for the bleak and dreary shores of the Forth and the Clyde
than the richest of soils and the most genial of climates had done for
Capua and Tarentum. Is there one member of this House, however strongly
he may hold the doctrine that the Government ought not to interfere
with the education of the people, who will stand up and say that, in his
opinion, the Scotch would now have been a happier and a more enlightened
people if they had been left, during the last five generations, to find
instruction for themselves?
I say then, Sir, that, if the science of Government be an experimental
science, this question is decided. We are in a condition to perform the
inductive process according to the rules laid down in the Novum Organum.
We have two nations closely connected, inhabiting the same island,
sprung from the same blood, speaking the same language, governed by the
same Sovereign and the same Legislature, holding essentially the same
religious faith, having the same allies and the same enemies. Of these
two nations one was, a hundred and fifty years ago, as respects opulence
and civilisation, in the highest rank among European communities, the
other in the lowest rank. The opulent and highly civilised nation leaves
the education of the people to free competition. In the poor and half
barbarous nation the education of the people is undertaken by the State.
The result is that the first are last and the last first. The common
people of Scotland,--it is vain to disguise the truth,--have passed the
common people of England. Free competition, tried with every advantage,
has produced effects of which, as the Congregational Union tells us,
we ought to be ashamed, and which must lower us in the opinion of every
intelligent foreigner. State education, tried under every disadvantage,
has produced an improvement to which it would be difficult to find a
parallel in any age or country. Such an experiment as this would be
regarded as conclusive in surgery or chemistry, and ought, I think, to
be regarded as equally conclusive in politics.
These, Sir, are the reasons which have satisfied me that it is the
duty of the State to educate the people. Being firmly convinced of that
truth, I shall not shrink from proclaiming it here and elsewhere, in
defiance of the loudest clamour that agitators can raise. The remainder
of my task is easy. For, if the great principle for which I have been
contending is admitted, the objections which have been made to the
details of our plan will vanish fast. I will deal with those objections
in the order in which they stand in the amendment moved by the
honourable Member for Finsbury.
First among his objections he places the cost. Surely, Sir, no person
who admits that it is our duty to train the minds of the rising
generation can think a hundred thousand pounds too large a sum for that
purpose. If we look at the matter in the lowest point of view, if we
consider human beings merely as producers of wealth, the difference
between an intelligent and a stupid population, estimated in pounds,
shillings, and pence, exceeds a hundredfold the proposed outlay. Nor
is this all. For every pound that you save in education, you will spend
five in prosecutions, in prisons, in penal settlements. I cannot believe
that the House, having never grudged anything that was asked for the
purpose of maintaining order and protecting property by means of pain
and fear, will begin to be niggardly as soon as it is proposed to effect
the same objects by making the people wiser and better.
The next objection made by the honourable Member to our plan is that it
will increase the influence of the Crown. This sum of a hundred thousand
pounds may, he apprehends, be employed in corruption and jobbing. Those
schoolmasters who vote for ministerial candidates will obtain a share
of the grant: those schoolmasters who vote for opponents of the ministry
will apply for assistance in vain. Sir, the honourable Member never
would have made this objection if he had taken the trouble to understand
the minutes which he has condemned. We propose to place this part of
the public expenditure under checks which must make such abuses as the
honourable Member anticipates morally impossible. Not only will there
be those ordinary checks which are thought sufficient to prevent the
misapplication of the many millions annually granted for the army, the
navy, the ordnance, the civil government: not only must the Ministers of
the Crown come every year to this House for a vote, and be prepared to
render an account of the manner in which they have laid out what had
been voted in the preceding year, but, when they have satisfied the
House, when they have got their vote, they will still be unable to
distribute the money at their discretion. Whatever they may do for any
schoolmaster must be done in concert with those persons who, in the
district where the schoolmaster lives, take an interest in education,
and contribute out of their private means to the expense of education.
When the honourable gentleman is afraid that we shall corrupt
the schoolmasters, he forgets, first, that we do not appoint the
schoolmasters; secondly, that we cannot dismiss the schoolmasters;
thirdly, that managers who are altogether independent of us can, without
our consent, dismiss the schoolmasters; and, fourthly, that without
the recommendation of those managers we can give nothing to the
schoolmasters. Observe, too, that such a recommendation will not be one
of those recommendations which goodnatured easy people are too apt
to give to everybody who asks; nor will it at all resemble those
recommendations which the Secretary of the Treasury is in the habit of
receiving. For every pound which we pay on the recommendation of the
managers, the managers themselves must pay two pounds. They must also
provide the schoolmaster with a house out of their own funds before they
can obtain for him a grant from the public funds. What chance of jobbing
is there here? It is common enough, no doubt, for a Member of Parliament
who votes with Government to ask that one of those who zealously
supported him at the last election may have a place in the Excise or
the Customs. But such a member would soon cease to solicit if the answer
were, "Your friend shall have a place of fifty pounds a year, if you
will give him a house and settle on him an income of a hundred a year. "
What chance then, I again ask, is there of jobbing? What, say some of
the dissenters of Leeds, is to prevent a Tory Government, a High
Church Government, from using this parliamentary grant to corrupt
the schoolmasters of our borough, and to induce them to use all their
influence in favour of a Tory and High Church candidate? Why, Sir, the
dissenters of Leeds themselves have the power to prevent it. Let them
subscribe to the schools: let them take a share in the management of the
schools: let them refuse to recommend to the committee of Council any
schoolmaster whom they suspect of having voted at any election from
corrupt motives: and the thing is done. Our plan, in truth, is made
up of checks. My only doubt is whether the checks may not be found too
numerous and too stringent. On our general conduct there is the ordinary
check, the parliamentary check. And, as respects those minute details
which it is impossible that this House can investigate, we shall be
checked, in every town and in every rural district, by boards consisting
of independent men zealous in the cause of education.
The truth is, Sir, that those who clamour most loudly against our plan,
have never thought of ascertaining what it is. I see that a gentleman,
who ought to have known better, has not been ashamed publicly to tell
the world that our plan will cost the nation two millions a year, and
will paralyse all the exertions of individuals to educate the people.
These two assertions are uttered in one breath. And yet, if he who made
them had read our minutes before he railed at them, he would have
seen that his predictions are contradictory; that they cannot both be
fulfilled; that, if individuals do not exert themselves, the country
will have to pay nothing; and that, if the country has to pay two
millions, it will be because individuals have exerted themselves with
such wonderful, such incredible vigour, as to raise four millions by
voluntary contributions.
The next objection made by the honourable Member for Finsbury is that we
have acted unconstitutionally, and have encroached on the functions of
Parliament. The Committee of Council he seems to consider as an unlawful
assembly. He calls it sometimes a self-elected body and sometimes a
self-appointed body. Sir, these are words without meaning. The Committee
is no more a self-elected body than the Board of Trade. It is a body
appointed by the Queen; and in appointing it Her Majesty has exercised,
under the advice of her responsible Ministers, a prerogative as old as
the monarchy. But, says the honourable Member, the constitutional course
would have been to apply for an Act of Parliament. On what ground?
Nothing but an Act of Parliament can legalise that which is illegal.
But whoever heard of an Act of Parliament to legalise what was already
beyond all dispute legal? Of course, if we wished to send aliens out
of the country, or to retain disaffected persons in custody without
bringing them to trial, we must obtain an Act of Parliament empowering
us to do so. But why should we ask for an Act of Parliament to empower
us to do what anybody may do, what the honourable Member for Finsbury
may do? Is there any doubt that he or anybody else may subscribe to a
school, give a stipend to a monitor, or settle a retiring pension on a
preceptor who has done good service? What any of the Queen's subjects
may do the Queen may do. Suppose that her privy purse were so large that
she could afford to employ a hundred thousand pounds in this beneficent
manner; would an Act of Parliament be necessary to enable her to do so?
Every part of our plan may lawfully be carried into execution by any
person, Sovereign or subject, who has the inclination and the money.
We have not the money; and for the money we come, in a strictly
constitutional manner, to the House of Commons. The course which we
have taken is in conformity with all precedent, as well as with
all principle.
There are military schools. No Act of Parliament was
necessary to authorise the establishing of such schools. All that
was necessary was a grant of money to defray the charge. When I was
Secretary at War it was my duty to bring under Her Majesty's notice the
situation of the female children of her soldiers. Many such children
accompanied every regiment, and their education was grievously
neglected. Her Majesty was graciously pleased to sign a warrant by which
a girls' school was attached to each corps. No Act of Parliament was
necessary. For to set up a school where girls might be taught to read,
and write, and sew, and cook, was perfectly legal already. I might have
set it up myself, if I had been rich enough. All that I had to ask from
Parliament was the money. But I ought to beg pardon for arguing a point
so clear.
The next objection to our plans is that they interfere with the
religious convictions of Her Majesty's subjects. It has been sometimes
insinuated, but it has never been proved, that the Committee of Council
has shown undue favour to the Established Church. Sir, I have carefully
read and considered the minutes; and I wish that every man who has
exerted his eloquence against them had done the same. I say that I have
carefully read and considered them, and that they seem to me to have
been drawn up with exemplary impartiality. The benefits which we offer
we offer to people of all religious persuasions alike. The dissenting
managers of schools will have equal authority with the managers who
belong to the Church. A boy who goes to meeting will be just as eligible
to be a monitor, and will receive just as large a stipend, as if he
went to the cathedral. The schoolmaster who is a nonconformist and the
schoolmaster who is a conformist will enjoy the same emoluments, and
will, after the same term of service, obtain, on the same conditions,
the same retiring pension. I wish that some gentleman would, instead
of using vague phrases about religious liberty and the rights of
conscience, answer this plain question. Suppose that in one of our large
towns there are four schools, a school connected with the Church, a
school connected with the Independents, a Baptist school, and a Wesleyan
school; what encouragement, pecuniary or honorary, will, by our plan, be
given to the school connected with the Church, and withheld from any of
the other three schools? Is it not indeed plain that, if by neglect or
maladministration the Church school should get into a bad state, while
the dissenting schools flourish, the dissenting schools will receive
public money and the Church school will receive none?
It is true, I admit, that in rural districts which are too poor to
support more than one school, the religious community to which
the majority belongs will have an advantage over other religious
communities. But this is not our fault. If we are as impartial as it
is possible to be, you surely do not expect more. If there should be a
parish containing nine hundred churchmen and a hundred dissenters, if
there should, in that parish, be a school connected with the Church,
if the dissenters in that parish should be too poor to set up another
school, undoubtedly the school connected with the Church will, in that
parish, get all that we give; and the dissenters will get nothing. But
observe that there is no partiality to the Church, as the Church, in
this arrangement. The churchmen get public money, not because they
are churchmen, but because they are the majority. The dissenters get
nothing, not because they are dissenters, but because they are a small
minority. There are districts where the case will be reversed, where
there will be dissenting schools, and no Church schools. In such cases
the dissenters will get what we have to give, and the churchmen will get
nothing.
But, Sir, I ought not to say that a churchman gets nothing by a system
which gives a good education to dissenters, or that a dissenter gets
nothing by a system which gives a good education to churchmen. We are
not, I hope, so much conformists, or so much nonconformists, as to
forget that we are Englishmen and Christians. We all, Churchmen,
Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, Methodists, have an interest in
this, that the great body of the people should be rescued from ignorance
and barbarism. I mentioned Lord George Gordon's mob. That mob began,
it is true, with the Roman Catholics: but, long before the tumults were
over, there was not a respectable Protestant in London who was not in
fear for his house, for his limbs, for his life, for the lives of those
who were dearest to him. The honourable Member for Finsbury says that we
call on men to pay for an education from which they derive no benefit.
I deny that there is one honest and industrious man in the country who
derives no benefit from living among honest and industrious neighbours
rather than among rioters and vagabonds. This matter is as much a matter
of common concern as the defence of our coast. Suppose that I were
to say, "Why do you tax me to fortify Portsmouth? If the people of
Portsmouth think that they cannot be safe without bastions and ravelins,
let the people of Portsmouth pay the engineers and masons. Why am I to
bear the charge of works from which I derive no advantage? " You would
answer, and most justly, that there is no man in the island who does
not derive advantage from these works, whether he resides within them or
not. And, as every man, in whatever part of the island he may live, is
bound to contribute to the support of those arsenals which are necessary
for our common security, so is every man, to whatever sect he may
belong, bound to contribute to the support of those schools on which,
not less than on our arsenals, our common security depends.
I now come to the last words of the amendment. The honourable Member
for Finsbury is apprehensive that our plan may interfere with the
civil rights of Her Majesty's subjects. How a man's civil rights can be
prejudiced by his learning to read and write, to multiply and divide, or
even by his obtaining some knowledge of history and geography, I do
not very well apprehend. One thing is clear, that persons sunk in that
ignorance in which, as we are assured by the Congregational Union, great
numbers of our countrymen are sunk, can be free only in name. It is
hardly necessary for us to appoint a Select Committee for the purpose of
inquiring whether knowledge be the ally or the enemy of liberty. He is,
I must say, but a short-sighted friend of the common people who is eager
to bestow on them a franchise which would make them all-powerful, and
yet would withhold from them that instruction without which their power
must be a curse to themselves and to the State.
This, Sir, is my defence. From the clamour of our accusers I appeal with
confidence to the country to which we must, in no long time, render
an account of our stewardship. I appeal with still more confidence
to future generations, which, while enjoying all the blessings of an
impartial and efficient system of public instruction, will find it
difficult to believe that the authors of that system should have had
to struggle with a vehement and pertinacious opposition, and still more
difficult to believe that such an opposition was offered in the name of
civil and religious freedom.
*****
INAUGURAL SPEECH AT GLASGOW COLLEGE. (MARCH 21, 1849) A SPEECH DELIVERED
AT THE COLLEGE OF GLASGOW ON THE 21ST OF MARCH, 1849.
At the election of Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, in
November, 1848, the votes stood thus: Mr Macaulay, 255; Colonel Mure,
203. The installation took place on the twenty-first of March, 1849;
and after that ceremony had been performed, the following Speech was
delivered.
My first duty, Gentlemen, is to return you my thanks for the honour
which you have conferred on me. You well know that it was wholly
unsolicited; and I can assure you that it was wholly unexpected. I
may add that, if I had been invited to become a candidate for your
suffrages, I should respectfully have declined the invitation. My
predecessor, whom I am so happy as to be able to call my friend,
declared from this place last year in language which well became him,
that he would not have come forward to displace so eminent a statesman
as Lord John Russell. I can with equal truth affirm that I would
not have come forward to displace so estimable a gentleman and so
accomplished a scholar as Colonel Mure. But Colonel Mure felt last
year that it was not for him, and I now feel that it is not for me,
to question the propriety of your decision on a point of which, by the
constitution of your body, you are the judges. I therefore gratefully
accept the office to which I have been called, fully purposing to use
whatever powers belong to it with a single view to the welfare and
credit of your society.
I am not using a mere phrase of course, when I say that the feelings
with which I bear apart in the ceremony of this day are such as I find
it difficult to utter in words. I do not think it strange that, when
that great master of eloquence, Edmund Burke, stood where I now stand,
he faltered and remained mute. Doubtless the multitude of thoughts which
rushed into his mind was such as even he could not easily arrange or
express. In truth there are few spectacles more striking or affecting
than that which a great historical place of education presents on a
solemn public day. There is something strangely interesting in the
contrast between the venerable antiquity of the body and the fresh and
ardent youth of the great majority of the members. Recollections and
hopes crowd upon us together. The past and the future are at once
brought close to us. Our thoughts wander back to the time when the
foundations of this ancient building were laid, and forward to the
time when those whom it is our office to guide and to teach will be the
guides and teachers of our posterity. On the present occasion we may,
with peculiar propriety, give such thoughts their course. For it has
chanced that my magistracy has fallen on a great secular epoch. This
is the four hundredth year of the existence of your University. At such
jubilees, jubilees of which no individual sees more than one, it is
natural, and it is good, that a society like this, a society which
survives all the transitory parts of which it is composed, a society
which has a corporate existence and a perpetual succession, should
review its annals, should retrace the stages of its growth from infancy
to maturity, and should try to find, in the experience of generations
which have passed away, lessons which may be profitable to generations
yet unborn.
The retrospect is full of interest and instruction. Perhaps it may be
doubted whether, since the Christian era, there has been any point of
time more important to the highest interests of mankind than that at
which the existence of your University commenced. It was at the moment
of a great destruction and of a great creation. Your society was
instituted just before the empire of the East perished; that strange
empire which, dragging on a languid life through the great age of
darkness, connected together the two great ages of light; that empire
which, adding nothing to our stores of knowledge, and producing not one
man great in letters, in science, or in art, yet preserved, in the midst
of barbarism, those masterpieces of Attic genius, which the highest
minds still contemplate, and long will contemplate, with admiring
despair. And at that very time, while the fanatical Moslem were
plundering the churches and palaces of Constantinople, breaking in
pieces Grecian sculptures, and giving to the flames piles of Grecian
eloquence, a few humble German artisans, who little knew that they were
calling into existence a power far mightier than that of the victorious
Sultan, were busied in cutting and setting the first types. The
University came into existence just in time to witness the disappearance
of the last trace of the Roman empire, and to witness the publication of
the earliest printed book.
At this conjuncture, a conjuncture of unrivalled interest in the history
of letters, a man, never to be mentioned without reverence by every
lover of letters, held the highest place in Europe. Our just attachment
to that Protestant faith to which our country owes so much must not
prevent us from paying the tribute which, on this occasion, and in this
place, justice and gratitude demand, to the founder of the University
of Glasgow, the greatest of the restorers of learning, Pope Nicholas the
Fifth. He had sprung from the common people; but his abilities and his
erudition had early attracted the notice of the great. He had studied
much and travelled far. He had visited Britain, which, in wealth and
refinement, was to his native Tuscany what the back settlements of
America now are to Britain. He had lived with the merchant princes of
Florence, those men who first ennobled trade by making trade the ally
of philosophy, of eloquence, and of taste. It was he who, under the
protection of the munificent and discerning Cosmo, arranged the first
public library that Modern Europe possessed. From privacy your founder
rose to a throne; but on the throne he never forgot the studies which
had been his delight in privacy. He was the centre of an illustrious
group, composed partly of the last great scholars of Greece, and partly
of the first great scholars of Italy, Theodore Gaza and George
of Trebizond, Bessarion and Filelfo, Marsilio Ficino and Poggio
Bracciolini. By him was founded the Vatican library, then and long after
the most precious and the most extensive collection of books in the
world. By him were carefully preserved the most valuable intellectual
treasures which had been snatched from the wreck of the Byzantine
empire. His agents were to be found everywhere, in the bazaars of the
farthest East, in the monasteries of the farthest West, purchasing or
copying worm-eaten parchments, on which were traced words worthy of
immortality. Under his patronage were prepared accurate Latin versions
of many precious remains of Greek poets and philosophers. But no
department of literature owes so much to him as history. By him were
introduced to the knowledge of Western Europe two great and unrivalled
models of historical composition, the work of Herodotus and the work of
Thucydides. By him, too, our ancestors were first made acquainted with
the graceful and lucid simplicity of Xenophon and with the manly good
sense of Polybius.
It was while he was occupied with cares like these that his attention
was called to the intellectual wants of this region, a region now
swarming with population, rich with culture, and resounding with the
clang of machinery, a region which now sends forth fleets laden with its
admirable fabrics to the lands of which, in his days, no geographer had
ever heard, then a wild, a poor, a half barbarous tract, lying on the
utmost verge of the known world. He gave his sanction to the plan of
establishing a University at Glasgow, and bestowed on the new seat of
learning all the privileges which belonged to the University of Bologna.
I can conceive that a pitying smile passed over his face as he named
Bologna and Glasgow together. At Bologna he had long studied. No spot
in the world had been more favoured by nature or by art. The surrounding
country was a fruitful and sunny country, a country of cornfields and
vineyards. In the city, the house of Bentivoglo bore rule, a house which
vied with the house of Medici in taste and magnificence, which has
left to posterity noble palaces and temples, and which gave a splendid
patronage to arts and letters. Glasgow your founder just knew to be a
poor, a small, a rude town, a town, as he would have thought, not likely
ever to be great and opulent; for the soil, compared with the rich
country at the foot of the Apennines, was barren, and the climate was
such that an Italian shuddered at the thought of it. But it is not on
the fertility of the soil, it is not on the mildness of the atmosphere,
that the prosperity of nations chiefly depends. Slavery and superstition
can make Campania a land of beggars, and can change the plain of Enna
into a desert. Nor is it beyond the power of human intelligence and
energy, developed by civil and spiritual freedom, to turn sterile rocks
and pestilential marshes into cities and gardens. Enlightened as your
founder was, he little knew that he was himself a chief agent in a great
revolution, physical and moral, political and religious, in a revolution
destined to make the last first and the first last, in a revolution
destined to invert the relative positions of Glasgow and Bologna. We
cannot, I think, better employ a few minutes than in reviewing the
stages of this great change in human affairs.
The review shall be short. Indeed I cannot do better than pass rapidly
from century to century. Look at the world, then, a hundred years after
the seal of Nicholas had been affixed to the instrument which
called your College into existence. We find Europe, we find Scotland
especially, in the agonies of that great revolution which we
emphatically call the Reformation. The liberal patronage which
Nicholas, and men like Nicholas, had given to learning, and of which
the establishment of this seat of learning is not the least remarkable
instance, had produced an effect which they had never contemplated.
Ignorance was the talisman on which their power depended; and that
talisman they had themselves broken. They had called in Knowledge as a
handmaid to decorate Superstition, and their error produced its natural
effect. I need not tell you what a part the votaries of classical
learning, and especially the votaries of Greek learning, the Humanists,
as they were then called, bore in the great movement against spiritual
tyranny. They formed, in fact, the vanguard of that movement. Every
one of the chief Reformers--I do not at this moment remember a single
exception--was a Humanist. Almost every eminent Humanist in the north of
Europe was, according to the measure of his uprightness and courage, a
Reformer. In a Scottish University I need hardly mention the names of
Knox, of Buchanan, of Melville, of Secretary Maitland. In truth, minds
daily nourished with the best literature of Greece and Rome necessarily
grew too strong to be trammelled by the cobwebs of the scholastic
divinity; and the influence of such minds was now rapidly felt by the
whole community; for the invention of printing had brought books within
the reach even of yeomen and of artisans. From the Mediterranean to the
Frozen Sea, therefore, the public mind was everywhere in a ferment; and
nowhere was the ferment greater than in Scotland. It was in the midst
of martyrdoms and proscriptions, in the midst of a war between power
and truth, that the first century of the existence of your University
closed.
Pass another hundred years; and we are in the midst of another
revolution. The war between Popery and Protestantism had, in this
island, been terminated by the victory of Protestantism. But from that
war another war had sprung, the war between Prelacy and Puritanism.
The hostile religious sects were allied, intermingled, confounded with
hostile political parties. The monarchical element of the constitution
was an object of almost exclusive devotion to the Prelatist. The popular
element of the constitution was especially dear to the Puritan. At
length an appeal was made to the sword. Puritanism triumphed; but
Puritanism was already divided against itself. Independency and
Republicanism were on one side, Presbyterianism and limited Monarchy on
the other. It was in the very darkest part of that dark time, it was
in the midst of battles, sieges, and executions, it was when the whole
world was still aghast at the awful spectacle of a British King standing
before a judgment seat, and laying his neck on a block, it was when the
mangled remains of the Duke of Hamilton had just been laid in the tomb
of his house, it was when the head of the Marquess of Montrose had just
been fixed on the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, that your University completed
her second century.
A hundred years more; and we have at length reached the beginning of a
happier period. Our civil and religious liberties had indeed been bought
with a fearful price. But they had been bought. The price had been
paid. The last battle had been fought on British ground. The last black
scaffold had been set up on Tower Hill. The evil days were over. A
bright and tranquil century, a century of religious toleration, of
domestic peace, of temperate freedom, of equal justice, was beginning.
That century is now closing. When we compare it with any equally long
period in the history of any other great society, we shall find abundant
cause for thankfulness to the Giver of all good. Nor is there any place
in the whole kingdom better fitted to excite this feeling than the place
where we are now assembled. For in the whole kingdom we shall find no
district in which the progress of trade, of manufactures, of wealth,
and of the arts of life, has been more rapid than in Clydesdale. Your
University has partaken largely of the prosperity of this city and of
the surrounding region. The security, the tranquillity, the liberty,
which have been propitious to the industry of the merchant and of the
manufacturer, have been also propitious to the industry of the scholar.
To the last century belong most of the names of which you justly boast.
The time would fail me if I attempted to do justice to the memory of all
the illustrious men who, during that period, taught or learned wisdom
within these ancient walls; geometricians, anatomists, jurists,
philologists, metaphysicians, poets: Simpson and Hunter, Millar and
Young, Reid and Stewart; Campbell, whose coffin was lately borne to a
grave in that renowned transept which contains the dust of Chaucer,
of Spenser, and of Dryden; Black, whose discoveries form an era in the
history of chemical science; Adam Smith, the greatest of all the masters
of political science; James Watt, who perhaps did more than any single
man has done, since the New Atlantis of Bacon was written, to accomplish
that glorious prophecy. We now speak the language of humility when we
say that the University of Glasgow need not fear a comparison with the
University of Bologna.
A fifth secular period is about to commence. There is no lack of
alarmists who will tell you that it is about to commence under evil
auspices. But from me you must expect no such gloomy prognostications.
I have heard them too long and too constantly to be scared by them. Ever
since I began to make observations on the state of my country, I have
been seeing nothing but growth, and hearing of nothing but decay. The
more I contemplate our noble institutions, the more convinced I am that
they are sound at heart, that they have nothing of age but its dignity,
and that their strength is still the strength of youth. The hurricane,
which has recently overthrown so much that was great and that seemed
durable, has only proved their solidity. They still stand, august and
immovable, while dynasties and churches are lying in heaps of ruin all
around us. I see no reason to doubt that, by the blessing of God on
a wise and temperate policy, on a policy of which the principle is
to preserve what is good by reforming in time what is evil, our civil
institutions may be preserved unimpaired to a late posterity, and that,
under the shade of our civil institutions, our academical institutions
may long continue to flourish.
I trust, therefore, that, when a hundred years more have run out, this
ancient College will still continue to deserve well of our country and
of mankind. I trust that the installation of 1949 will be attended by a
still greater assembly of students than I have the happiness now to see
before me. That assemblage, indeed, may not meet in the place where we
have met. These venerable halls may have disappeared. My successor may
speak to your successors in a more stately edifice, in a edifice which,
even among the magnificent buildings of the future Glasgow, will still
be admired as a fine specimen of the architecture which flourished in
the days of the good Queen Victoria. But, though the site and the walls
may be new, the spirit of the institution will, I hope, be still the
same. My successor will, I hope, be able to boast that the fifth century
of the University has even been more glorious than the fourth. He will
be able to vindicate that boast by citing a long list of eminent men,
great masters of experimental science, of ancient learning, of our
native eloquence, ornaments of the senate, the pulpit and the bar. He
will, I hope, mention with high honour some of my young friends who now
hear me; and he will, I also hope, be able to add that their talents
and learning were not wasted on selfish or ignoble objects, but were
employed to promote the physical and moral good of their species, to
extend the empire of man over the material world, to defend the cause
of civil and religious liberty against tyrants and bigots, and to defend
the cause of virtue and order against the enemies of all divine and
human laws.
I have now given utterance to a part, and to a part only, of the
recollections and anticipations of which, on this solemn occasion, my
mind is full. I again thank you for the honour which you have bestowed
on me; and I assure you that, while I live, I shall never cease to take
a deep interest in the welfare and fame of the body with which, by your
kindness, I have this day become connected.
*****
RE-ELECTION TO PARLIAMENT. (NOVEMBER 2, 1852) A SPEECH DELIVERED AT
EDINBURGH ON THE 2D OF NOVEMBER, 1852.
At the General Election of 1852 the votes for the City of Edinburgh
stood thus:
Mr Macaulay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1872
Mr Cowan . . . . . . . . . . .
