No More Learning

Might
not Parliament be induced to retrace its steps? Might we not find it
difficult to maintain even the present limitation? The wisest course
would, in my opinion, be to reduce the hours of labour from twelve to
eleven, to observe the effect of that experiment, and if, as I hope
and believe, the result should be satisfactory, then to make a further
reduction from eleven to ten. This is a question, however, which will be
with more advantage considered when we are in Committee.

One word, Sir, before I sit down, in answer to my noble friend near me.
(Lord Morpeth. ) He seems to think that this bill is ill timed. I own
that I cannot agree with him. We carried up on Monday last to the bar
of the Lords a bill which will remove the most hateful and pernicious
restriction that ever was laid on trade. Nothing can be more proper
than to apply, in the same week, a remedy to a great evil of a directly
opposite kind. As lawgivers, we have two great faults to confess and to
repair. We have done that which we ought not to have done. We have left
undone that which we ought to have done. We have regulated that which we
should have left to regulate itself. We have left unregulated that which
we were bound to regulate. We have given to some branches of industry
a protection which has proved their bane. We have withheld from public
health and public morals the protection which was their due. We have
prevented the labourer from buying his loaf where he could get it
cheapest; but we have not prevented him from ruining his body and mind
by premature and immoderate toil. I hope that we have seen the last
both of a vicious system of interference and of a vicious system of
non-interference, and that our poorer countrymen will no longer have
reason to attribute their sufferings either to our meddling or to our
neglect.

*****




THE LITERATURE OF BRITAIN. (NOVEMBER 4, 1846) A SPEECH DELIVERED AT
THE OPENING OF THE EDINBURGH PHILOSOPHICAL INSTITUTION ON THE 4TH OF
NOVEMBER 1846.

I thank you, Gentlemen, for this cordial reception. I have thought it
right to steal a short time from duties not unimportant for the purpose
of lending my aid to a an undertaking calculated, as I think, to raise
the credit and to promote the best interests of the city which has so
many claims on my gratitude.

The Directors of our Institution have requested me to propose to you as
a toast the Literature of Britain. They could not have assigned to me
a more agreeable duty. They chief object of this Institution is, I
conceive, to impart knowledge through the medium of our own language.
Edinburgh is already rich in libraries worthy of her fame as a seat
of literature and a seat of jurisprudence. A man of letters can here
without difficulty obtain access to repositories filled with the wisdom
of many ages and of many nations. But something was still wanting.
We still wanted a library open to that large, that important, that
respectable class which, though by no means destitute of liberal
curiosity or of sensibility to literary pleasures, is yet forced to
be content with what is written in our own tongue. For that class
especially, I do not say exclusively, this library is intended.
Our directors, I hope, will not be satisfied, I, as a member, shall
certainly not be satisfied, till we possess a noble and complete
collection of English books, till it is impossible to seek in vain
on our shelves for a single English book which is valuable either on
account of matter or on account of manner, which throws any light on our
civil, ecclesiastical, intellectual, or social history, which, in short,
can afford either useful instruction or harmless amusement.

From such a collection, placed within the reach of that large and
valuable class which I have mentioned, I am disposed to expect great
good. And when I say this, I do not take into the account those rare
cases to which my valued friend, the Lord Provost (Mr Adam Black. ), so
happily alluded. It is indeed not impossible that some man of genius who
may enrich our literature with imperishable eloquence or song, or who
may extend the empire of our race over matter, may feel in our reading
room, for the first time the consciousness of powers yet undeveloped.
It is not impossible that our volumes may suggest the first thought of
something great to some future Burns, or Watt, or Arkwright. But I do
not speak of these extraordinary cases. What I confidently anticipate is
that, through the whole of that class whose benefit we have peculiarly
in view, there will be a moral and an intellectual improvement; that
many hours, which might otherwise be wasted in folly or in vice, will
be employed in pursuits which, while they afford the highest and most
lasting pleasure, are not only harmless, but purifying and elevating.
My own experience, my own observation, justifies me in entertaining this
hope. I have had opportunities, both in this and in other countries, of
forming some estimate of the effect which is likely to be produced by
a good collection of books on a society of young men. There is, I will
venture to say, no judicious commanding officer of a regiment who
will not tell you that the vicinity of a valuable library will improve
perceptibly the whole character of a mess. I well knew one eminent
military servant of the East India Company, a man of great and various
accomplishments, a man honourably distinguished both in war and in
diplomacy, a man who enjoyed the confidence of some of the greatest
generals and statesmen of our time. When I asked him how, having left
his country while still a boy, and having passed his youth at military
stations in India, he had been able to educate himself, his answer was,
that he had been stationed in the neighbourhood of an excellent library,
that he had been allowed free access to the books, and that they had, at
the most critical time of his life, decided his character, and saved him
from being a mere smoking, card-playing, punch-drinking lounger.

Some of the objections which have been made to such institutions as
ours have been so happily and completely refuted by my friend the Lord
Provost, and by the Most Reverend Prelate who has honoured us with his
presence this evening (Archbishop Whateley. ), that it would be idle to
say again what has been so well said. There is, however, one objection
which, with your permission, I will notice. Some men, of whom I wish
to speak with great respect, are haunted, as it seems to me, with an
unreasonable fear of what they call superficial knowledge. Knowledge,
they say, which really deserves the name, is a great blessing to
mankind, the ally of virtue, the harbinger of freedom. But such
knowledge must be profound. A crowd of people who have a smattering of
mathematics, a smattering of astronomy, a smattering of chemistry, who
have read a little poetry and a little history, is dangerous to the
commonwealth. Such half-knowledge is worse than ignorance. And then the
authority of Pope is vouched. Drink deep or taste not; shallow draughts
intoxicate: drink largely; and that will sober you. I must confess that
the danger which alarms these gentlemen never seemed to me very serious:
and my reason is this; that I never could prevail on any person who
pronounced superficial knowledge a curse, and profound knowledge a
blessing, to tell me what was his standard of profundity. The argument
proceeds on the supposition that there is some line between profound
and superficial knowledge similar to that which separates truth from
falsehood. I know of no such line. When we talk of men of deep science,
do we mean that they have got to the bottom or near the bottom of
science? Do we mean that they know all that is capable of being known?
Do we mean even that they know, in their own especial department, all
that the smatterers of the next generation will know? Why, if we compare
the little truth that we know with the infinite mass of truth which we
do not know, we are all shallow together; and the greatest philosophers
that ever lived would be the first to confess their shallowness. If we
could call up the first of human beings, if we could call up Newton,
and ask him whether, even in those sciences in which he had no rival, he
considered himself as profoundly knowing, he would have told us that he
was but a smatterer like ourselves, and that the difference between his
knowledge and ours vanished, when compared with the quantity of truth
still undiscovered, just as the distance between a person at the foot of
Ben Lomond and at the top of Ben Lomond vanishes when compared with the
distance of the fixed stars.

It is evident then that those who are afraid of superficial knowledge
do not mean by superficial knowledge knowledge which is superficial when
compared with the whole quantity of truth capable of being known. For,
in that sense, all human knowledge is, and always has been, and always
must be, superficial. What then is the standard? Is it the same two
years together in any country? Is it the same, at the same moment, in
any two countries? Is it not notorious that the profundity of one age
is the shallowness of the next; that the profundity of one nation is the
shallowness of a neighbouring nation? Ramohun Roy passed, among Hindoos,
for a man of profound Western learning; but he would have been but a
very superficial member of this Institute. Strabo was justly entitled
to be called a profound geographer eighteen hundred years ago. But
a teacher of geography, who had never heard of America, would now be
laughed at by the girls of a boarding-school. What would now be thought
of the greatest chemist of 1746, or of the greatest geologist of
1746? The truth is that, in all experimental science, mankind is, of
necessity, constantly advancing. Every generation, of course, has its
front rank and its rear rank; but the rear rank of a later generation
occupies the ground which was occupied by the front rank of a former
generation.

You remember Gulliver's adventures. First he is shipwrecked in a country
of little men; and he is a Colossus among them. He strides over the
walls of their capital: he stands higher than the cupola of their great
temple: he tugs after him a royal fleet: he stretches his legs; and a
royal army, with drums beating and colours flying, marches through the
gigantic arch: he devours a whole granary for breakfast, eats a herd of
cattle for dinner, and washes down his meal with all the hogsheads of a
cellar. In his next voyage he is among men sixty feet high. He who, in
Lilliput, used to take people up in his hand in order that he might be
able to hear them, is himself taken up in the hands and held to the
ears of his masters. It is all that he can do to defend himself with his
hanger against the rats and mice. The court ladies amuse themselves with
seeing him fight wasps and frogs: the monkey runs off with him to the
chimney top: the dwarf drops him into the cream jug and leaves him to
swim for his life. Now, was Gulliver a tall or a short man? Why, in his
own house at Rotherhithe, he was thought a man of the ordinary stature.
Take him to Lilliput; and he is Quinbus Flestrin, the Man Mountain. Take
him to Brobdingnag, and he is Grildrig, the little Manikin. It is the
same in science. The pygmies of one society would have passed for giants
in another.

It might be amusing to institute a comparison between one of the
profoundly learned men of the thirteenth century and one of the
superficial students who will frequent our library. Take the great
philosopher of the time of Henry the Third of England, or Alexander the
Third of Scotland, the man renowned all over the island, and even as far
as Italy and Spain, as the first of astronomers and chemists. What is
his astronomy? He is a firm believer in the Ptolemaic system. He never
heard of the law of gravitation. Tell him that the succession of day and
night is caused by the turning of the earth on its axis. Tell him
that, in consequence of this motion, the polar diameter of the earth is
shorter than the equatorial diameter. Tell him that the succession of
summer and winter is caused by the revolution of the earth round the
sun. If he does not set you down for an idiot, he lays an information
against you before the Bishop, and has you burned for a heretic. To do
him justice, however, if he is ill informed on these points, there
are other points on which Newton and Laplace were mere children when
compared with him. He can cast your nativity. He knows what will happen
when Saturn is in the House of Life, and what will happen when Mars is
in conjunction with the Dragon's Tail. He can read in the stars whether
an expedition will be successful, whether the next harvest will be
plentiful, which of your children will be fortunate in marriage, and
which will be lost at sea. Happy the State, happy the family, which
is guided by the counsels of so profound a man! And what but mischief,
public and private, can we expect from the temerity and conceit of
scolists who know no more about the heavenly bodies than what they have
learned from Sir John Herschel's beautiful little volume. But, to speak
seriously, is not a little truth better than a great deal of falsehood?
Is not the man who, in the evenings of a fortnight, has acquired a
correct notion of the solar system, a more profound astronomer than a
man who has passed thirty years in reading lectures about the primum
mobile, and in drawing schemes of horoscopes?

Or take chemistry. Our philosopher of the thirteenth century shall be,
if you please, an universal genius, chemist as well as astronomer.
He has perhaps got so far as to know, that if he mixes charcoal and
saltpetre in certain proportions and then applies fire, there will be
an explosion which will shatter all his retorts and aludels; and he is
proud of knowing what will in a later age be familiar to all the idle
boys in the kingdom. But there are departments of science in which he
need not fear the rivalry of Black, or Lavoisier, or Cavendish, or Davy.
He is in hot pursuit of the philosopher's stone, of the stone that is
to bestow wealth, and health, and longevity. He has a long array of
strangely shaped vessels, filled with red oil and white oil, constantly
boiling. The moment of projection is at hand; and soon all his kettles
and gridirons will be turned into pure gold. Poor Professor Faraday can
do nothing of the sort. I should deceive you if I held out to you the
smallest hope that he will ever turn your halfpence into sovereigns. But
if you can induce him to give at our Institute a course of lectures such
as I once heard him give at the Royal Institution to children in the
Christmas holidays, I can promise you that you will know more about the
effects produced on bodies by heat and moisture than was known to some
alchemists who, in the middle ages, were thought worthy of the patronage
of kings.

As it has been in science so it has been in literature. Compare the
literary acquirements of the great men of the thirteenth century with
those which will be within the reach of many who will frequent our
reading room. As to Greek learning, the profound man of the thirteenth
century was absolutely on a par with the superficial man of the
nineteenth. In the modern languages, there was not, six hundred years
ago, a single volume which is now read. The library of our profound
scholar must have consisted entirely of Latin books. We will suppose
him to have had both a large and a choice collection. We will allow him
thirty, nay forty manuscripts, and among them a Virgil, a Terence, a
Lucan, an Ovid, a Statius, a great deal of Livy, a great deal of Cicero.
In allowing him all this, we are dealing most liberally with him; for it
is much more likely that his shelves were filled with treaties on school
divinity and canon law, composed by writers whose names the world has
very wisely forgotten. But, even if we suppose him to have possessed
all that is most valuable in the literature of Rome, I say with perfect
confidence that, both in respect of intellectual improvement, and in
respect of intellectual pleasures, he was far less favourably situated
than a man who now, knowing only the English language, has a bookcase
filled with the best English works. Our great man of the Middle Ages
could not form any conception of any tragedy approaching Macbeth or
Lear, or of any comedy equal to Henry the Fourth or Twelfth Night. The
best epic poem that he had read was far inferior to the Paradise Lost;
and all the tomes of his philosophers were not worth a page of the Novum
Organum.

The Novum Organum, it is true, persons who know only English must read
in a translation: and this reminds me of one great advantage which such
persons will derive from our Institution. They will, in our library, be
able to form some acquaintance with the master minds of remote ages and
foreign countries. A large part of what is best worth knowing in ancient
literature, and in the literature of France, Italy, Germany, and Spain,
has been translated into our own tongue. It is scarcely possible that
the translation of any book of the highest class can be equal to the
original. But, though the finer touches may be lost in the copy, the
great outlines will remain. An Englishman who never saw the frescoes in
the Vatican may yet, from engravings, form some notion of the exquisite
grace of Raphael, and of the sublimity and energy of Michael Angelo. And
so the genius of Homer is seen in the poorest version of the Iliad; the
genius of Cervantes is seen in the poorest version of Don Quixote. Let
it not be supposed that I wish to dissuade any person from studying
either the ancient languages or the languages of modern Europe. Far from
it. I prize most highly those keys of knowledge; and I think that no man
who has leisure for study ought to be content until he possesses several
of them. I always much admired a saying of the Emperor Charles the
Fifth. "When I learn a new language," he said, "I feel as if I had got
a new soul. " But I would console those who have not time to make
themselves linguists by assuring them that, by means of their own mother
tongue, they may obtain ready access to vast intellectual treasures, to
treasures such as might have been envied by the greatest linguists of
the age of Charles the Fifth, to treasures surpassing those which were
possessed by Aldus, by Erasmus, and by Melancthon.

And thus I am brought back to the point from which I started. I have
been requested to invite you to fill your glasses to the Literature of
Britain; to that literature, the brightest, the purest, the most durable
of all the glories of our country; to that literature, so rich in
precious truth and precious fiction; to that literature which boasts of
the prince of all poets and of the prince of all philosophers; to that
literature which has exercised an influence wider than that of our
commerce, and mightier than that of our arms; to that literature which
has taught France the principles of liberty, and has furnished Germany
with models of art; to that literature which forms a tie closer than the
tie of consanguinity between us and the commonwealths of the valley of
the Mississippi; to that literature before the light of which impious
and cruel superstitions are fast taking flight on the banks of the
Ganges; to that literature which will, in future ages, instruct and
delight the unborn millions who will have turned the Australasian
and Caffrarian deserts into cities and gardens. To the Literature of
Britain, then! And, wherever British literature spreads, may it be
attended by British virtue and by British freedom!

*****




EDUCATION. (APRIL 19, 1847) A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
ON THE 18TH OF APRIL 1847.

In the year 1847 the Government asked from the House of Commons a grant
of one hundred thousand pounds for the education of the people. On the
nineteenth of April, Lord John Russell, having explained the reasons for
this application, moved the order of the day for a Committee of Supply.
Mr Thomas Duncombe, Member for Finsbury, moved the following amendment:
"That previous to any grant of public money being assented to by this
House, for the purpose of carrying out the scheme of national education,
as developed in the Minutes of the Committee of Council on Education
in August and December last, which minutes have been presented to both
Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty, a select Committee be
appointed to inquire into the justice and expediency of such a scheme,
and its probable annual cost; also to inquire whether the regulations
attached thereto do not unduly increase the influence of the Crown,
invade the constitutional functions of Parliament, and interfere with
the religious convictions and civil rights of Her Majesty's subjects. "

In opposition to this amendment, the following Speech was made. After
a debate of three nights, Mr Thomas Duncombe obtained permission to
withdraw the latter part of his amendment. The first part was put, and
negatived by 372 votes to 47.

You will not wonder, Sir, that I am desirous to catch your eye this
evening. The first duty which I performed, as a Member of the Committee
of Council which is charged with the superintendence of public
instruction, was to give my hearty assent to the plan which the
honourable Member for Finsbury calls on the House to condemn. I am one
of those who have been accused in every part of the kingdom, and who are
now accused in Parliament, of aiming, under specious pretences, a
blow at the civil and religious liberties of the people. It is natural
therefore that I should seize the earliest opportunity of vindicating
myself from so grave a charge.

The honourable Member for Finsbury must excuse me if, in the remarks
which I have to offer to the House, I should not follow very closely the
order of his speech. The truth is that a mere answer to his speech would
be no defence of myself or of my colleagues. I am surprised, I own, that
a man of his acuteness and ability should, on such an occasion, have
made such a speech. The country is excited from one end to the other by
a great question of principle. On that question the Government has taken
one side. The honourable Member stands forth as the chosen and trusted
champion of a great party which takes the other side. We expected to
hear from him a full exposition of the views of those in whose name he
speaks. But, to our astonishment, he has scarcely even alluded to the
controversy which has divided the whole nation. He has entertained us
with sarcasms and personal anecdotes: he has talked much about matters
of mere detail: but I must say that, after listening with close
attention to all that he has said, I am quite unable to discover
whether, on the only important point which is in issue, he agrees
with us or with that large and active body of Nonconformists which is
diametrically opposed to us. He has sate down without dropping one word
from which it is possible to discover whether he thinks that education
is or that it is not a matter with which the State ought to interfere.
Yet that is the question about which the whole nation has, during
several weeks, been writing, reading, speaking, hearing, thinking,
petitioning, and on which it is now the duty of Parliament to pronounce
a decision. That question once settled, there will be, I believe,
very little room for dispute. If it be not competent to the State to
interfere with the education of the people, the mode of interference
recommended by the Committee of Council must of course be condemned.
If it be the right and the duty of the State to make provision for the
education of the people, the objections made to our plan will, in a very
few words, be shown to be frivolous.

I shall take a course very different from that which has been taken
by the honourable gentleman. I shall in the clearest manner profess
my opinion on that great question of principle which he has studiously
evaded; and for my opinion I shall give what seem to me to be
unanswerable reasons.

I believe, Sir, that it is the right and the duty of the State to
provide means of education for the common people. This proposition seems
to me to be implied in every definition that has ever yet been given of
the functions of a government. About the extent of those functions there
has been much difference of opinion among ingenious men. There are some
who hold that it is the business of a government to meddle with every
part of the system of human life, to regulate trade by bounties and
prohibitions, to regulate expenditure by sumptuary laws, to regulate
literature by a censorship, to regulate religion by an inquisition.
Others go to the opposite extreme, and assign to government a very
narrow sphere of action. But the very narrowest sphere that ever was
assigned to governments by any school of political philosophy is quite
wide enough for my purpose. On one point all the disputants are agreed.
They unanimously acknowledge that it is the duty of every government
to take order for giving security to the persons and property of the
members of the community.

This being admitted, can it be denied that the education of the common
people is a most effectual means of securing our persons and our
property? Let Adam Smith answer that question for me. His authority,
always high, is, on this subject, entitled to peculiar respect, because
he extremely disliked busy, prying, interfering governments. He was for
leaving literature, arts, sciences, to take care of themselves. He was
not friendly to ecclesiastical establishments. He was of opinion, that
the State ought not to meddle with the education of the rich. But he has
expressly told us that a distinction is to be made, particularly in a
commercial and highly civilised society, between the education of the
rich and the education of the poor. The education of the poor, he
says, is a matter which deeply concerns the commonwealth. Just as the
magistrate ought to interfere for the purpose of preventing the leprosy
from spreading among the people, he ought to interfere for the purpose
of stopping the progress of the moral distempers which are inseparable
from ignorance. Nor can this duty be neglected without danger to the
public peace. If you leave the multitude uninstructed, there is serious
risk that religious animosities may produce the most dreadful disorders.
The most dreadful disorders! Those are Adam Smith's own words; and
prophetic words they were. Scarcely had he given this warning to
our rulers when his prediction was fulfilled in a manner never to be
forgotten. I speak of the No Popery riots of 1780. I do not know that I
could find in all history a stronger proof of the proposition, that the
ignorance of the common people makes the property, the limbs, the lives
of all classes insecure. Without the shadow of a grievance, at the
summons of a madman, a hundred thousand people rise in insurrection.
During a whole week, there is anarchy in the greatest and wealthiest
of European cities. The parliament is besieged. Your predecessor sits
trembling in his chair, and expects every moment to see the door beaten
in by the ruffians whose roar he hears all round the house. The peers
are pulled out of their coaches. The bishops in their lawn are forced to
fly over the tiles.
The chapels of foreign ambassadors, buildings made
sacred by the law of nations, are destroyed. The house of the Chief
Justice is demolished. The little children of the Prime Minister are
taken out of their beds and laid in their night clothes on the table of
the Horse Guards, the only safe asylum from the fury of the rabble. The
prisons are opened. Highwaymen, housebreakers, murderers, come forth
to swell the mob by which they have been set free. Thirty-six fires are
blazing at once in London. Then comes the retribution. Count up all the
wretches who were shot, who were hanged, who were crushed, who drank
themselves to death at the rivers of gin which ran down Holborn Hill;
and you will find that battles have been lost and won with a smaller
sacrifice of life. And what was the cause of this calamity, a calamity
which, in the history of London, ranks with the great plague and the
great fire? The cause was the ignorance of a population which had been
suffered, in the neighbourhood of palaces, theatres, temples, to grow up
as rude and stupid as any tribe of tattooed cannibals in New Zealand, I
might say as any drove of beasts in Smithfield Market.

The instance is striking: but it is not solitary. To the same cause are
to be ascribed the riots of Nottingham, the sack of Bristol, all the
outrages of Ludd, and Swing, and Rebecca, beautiful and costly machinery
broken to pieces in Yorkshire, barns and haystacks blazing in Kent,
fences and buildings pulled down in Wales. Could such things have been
done in a country in which the mind of the labourer had been opened by
education, in which he had been taught to find pleasure in the exercise
of his intellect, taught to revere his Maker, taught to respect
legitimate authority, and taught at the same time to seek the redress of
real wrongs by peaceful and constitutional means?

This then is my argument. It is the duty of Government to protect our
persons and property from danger. The gross ignorance of the common
people is a principal cause of danger to our persons and property.
Therefore, it is the duty of Government to take care that the common
people shall not be grossly ignorant.

And what is the alternative? It is universally allowed that, by some
means, Government must protect our persons and property. If you take
away education, what means do you leave? You leave means such as only
necessity can justify, means which inflict a fearful amount of pain,
not only on the guilty, but on the innocent who are connected with
the guilty. You leave guns and bayonets, stocks and whipping-posts,
treadmills, solitary cells, penal colonies, gibbets. See then how the
case stands. Here is an end which, as we all agree, governments are
bound to attain. There are only two ways of attaining it. One of those
ways is by making men better, and wiser, and happier. The other way is
by making them infamous and miserable. Can it be doubted which way we
ought to prefer? Is it not strange, is it not almost incredible, that
pious and benevolent men should gravely propound the doctrine that the
magistrate is bound to punish and at the same time bound not to teach?
To me it seems quite clear that whoever has a right to hang has a right
to educate. Can we think without shame and remorse that more than half
of those wretches who have been tied up at Newgate in our time might
have been living happily, that more than half of those who are now in
our gaols might have been enjoying liberty and using that liberty well,
that such a hell on earth as Norfolk Island, need never have existed, if
we had expended in training honest men but a small part of what we have
expended in hunting and torturing rogues.

I would earnestly entreat every gentleman to look at a report which
is contained in the Appendix to the First Volume of the Minutes of
the Committee of Council. I speak of the report made by Mr Seymour
Tremenheare on the state of that part of Monmouthshire which is
inhabited by a population chiefly employed in mining. He found that,
in this district, towards the close of 1839, out of eleven thousand
children who were of an age to attend school, eight thousand never went
to any school at all, and that most of the remaining three thousand
might almost as well have gone to no school as to the squalid hovels in
which men who ought themselves to have been learners pretended to teach.
In general these men had only one qualification for their employment;
and that was their utter unfitness for every other employment. They were
disabled miners, or broken hucksters. In their schools all was stench,
and noise, and confusion. Now and then the clamour of the boys was
silenced for two minutes by the furious menaces of the master; but it
soon broke out again. The instruction given was of the lowest kind. Not
one school in ten was provided with a single map. This is the way in
which you suffered the minds of a great population to be formed. And now
for the effects of your negligence. The barbarian inhabitants of this
region rise in an insane rebellion against the Government. They come
pouring down their valleys to Newport. They fire on the Queen's troops.
They wound a magistrate. The soldiers fire in return; and too many of
these wretched men pay with their lives the penalty of their crime. But
is the crime theirs alone? Is it strange that they should listen to the
only teaching that they had? How can you, who took no pains to instruct
them, blame them for giving ear to the demagogue who took pains to
delude them? We put them down, of course. We punished them. We had no
choice. Order must be maintained; property must be protected; and, since
we had omitted to take the best way of keeping these people quiet, we
were under the necessity of keeping them quiet by the dread of the sword
and the halter. But could any necessity be more cruel? And which of us
would run the risk of being placed under such necessity a second time?

I say, therefore, that the education of the people is not only a means,
but the best means, of attaining that which all allow to be a chief end
of government; and, if this be so, it passes my faculties to understand
how any man can gravely contend that Government has nothing to do with
the education of the people.

My confidence in my opinion is strengthened when I recollect that I hold
that opinion in common with all the greatest lawgivers, statesmen,
and political philosophers of all nations and ages, with all the most
illustrious champions of civil and spiritual freedom, and especially
with those men whose names were once held in the highest veneration
by the Protestant Dissenters of England. I might cite many of the most
venerable names of the old world; but I would rather cite the example
of that country which the supporters of the Voluntary system here are
always recommending to us as a pattern. Go back to the days when the
little society which has expanded into the opulent and enlightened
commonwealth of Massachusetts began to exist. Our modern Dissenters will
scarcely, I think, venture to speak contumeliously of those Puritans
whose spirit Laud and his High Commission Court could not subdue, of
those Puritans who were willing to leave home and kindred, and all the
comforts and refinements of civilised life, to cross the ocean, to
fix their abode in forests among wild beasts and wild men, rather than
commit the sin of performing, in the House of God, one gesture which
they believed to be displeasing to Him. Did those brave exiles think it
inconsistent with civil or religious freedom that the State should take
charge of the education of the people? No, Sir; one of the earliest laws
enacted by the Puritan colonists was that every township, as soon as the
Lord had increased it to the number of fifty houses, should appoint one
to teach all children to write and read, and that every township of a
hundred houses should set up a grammar school. Nor have the descendants
of those who made this law ever ceased to hold that the public
authorities were bound to provide the means of public instruction. Nor
is this doctrine confined to New England. "Educate the people" was
the first admonition addressed by Penn to the colony which he founded.
"Educate the people" was the legacy of Washington to the nation which
he had saved. "Educate the people" was the unceasing exhortation of
Jefferson; and I quote Jefferson with peculiar pleasure, because of all
the eminent men that have ever lived, Adam Smith himself not excepted,
Jefferson was the one who most abhorred everything like meddling on the
part of governments. Yet the chief business of his later years was to
establish a good system of State education in Virginia.

And, against such authority as this, what have you who take the other
side to show? Can you mention a single great philosopher, a single man
distinguished by his zeal for liberty, humanity, and truth, who, from
the beginning of the world down to the time of this present Parliament,
ever held your doctrines? You can oppose to the unanimous voice of all
the wise and good, of all ages, and of both hemispheres, nothing but a
clamour which was first heard a few months ago, a clamour in which you
cannot join without condemning, not only all whose memory you profess to
hold in reverence, but even your former selves.

This new theory of politics has at least the merit of originality. It
may be fairly stated thus. All men have hitherto been utterly in the
wrong as to the nature and objects of civil government. The great truth,
hidden from every preceding generation, and at length revealed, in the
year 1846, to some highly respectable ministers and elders of dissenting
congregations, is this. Government is simply a great hangman. Government
ought to do nothing except by harsh and degrading means. 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.