it not be a crowning glory for your country to take it up and carry it on? Wearing the honours of a thousand years, and standing at the head of the civilisation of Europe, England will add still more to her renown, and establish a new title to the respect of future ages if she will perform this great act of beneficence. The young republic of the West, standing at the head of the civilisation of America, vigorous in her youth, and far-reaching in her desires, will walk side by side with you, and exert herself in equal measure for so grand a consummation. She has been studying during all her existence how to keep great states at peace, and make them work for a common object, while she leaves to them all necessary independence for their own peculiar government. She does this, it is true, by means of a federative system, which she finds best for herself, and which she has cemented by thousands of millions in treasure and hundreds of thousands in precious lives. How far this system may be carried is yet unknown. It may not be possible to extend it to distinct nationalities or to heterogeneous races. But there is another bond less strict, yet capable of binding all nations and all races. This is a uniform system of rules for the guidance of nations and their citizens in their intercourse with each other, framed by the concurring wisdom of each, and adopted by the free consent of all. Such an international code, the public law of Christendom, will prove a gentle but all-constraining bond of nations, self-imposed, and binding them together to abstain from war, except in the last extremity, and in peace to help each other, making the weak strong and the strong just, encouraging the intellectual culture, the moral growth, and the industrious pursuits of each, and promoting in all that which is the true end of government, the freedom and happiness of the individual man.

A dd nes s

BY

THE RIGHT HON. H. A. BRUCE, M.P.,

ON EDUCATION.

A

FTER thirty years of discussion and controversy in the press, in Parliament, in every diocese, in every town, almost in every parish in England and Wales, it seems a bold thing to say that the subject of national education has never thoroughly possessed itself of the public mind, has never occupied that place in the heart and conscience of the nation to which its vast and pressing importance entitles it. Books and pamphlets, sermons and lectures in abundance have been published and delivered; there have been many debates in Parliament, and innumerable public meetings; many millions of money, public and private, have been freely given and spent, and great individual exertions and sacrifices have been made. The Church has founded its central and diocesan societies, and its clergy have, as a rule, displayed an energy and self-devotion above all praise; the Nonconformists have shown an ever-increasing zeal and activity; yet, after all said and done, it cannot be denied that the subject has never been grappled with in that earnest and vigorous spirit which is the fruit of a strong conviction of a great evil to be removed, and a great good to be won. Education, instead of being discussed on its own merits, has been made the battle-field of religious parties; and the adoption of a real and effective national system has been kept subordinate to the interests or supposed interests of Churchmen or Dissenters. The first modest efforts of Government to promote it were received with distrust and opposition; and the long and animated debates in Parliament upon the principles on which the public grant should be administered, seem to have been inspired, not so much by zeal for education, as by the jealous fear of the preponderance of one religious party over the other, or of the state over both. The attempts

made by Sir John Pakington and Earl Russell to introduce a more comprehensive system, and to make the provision of education compulsory, were summarily rejected by Parliament, and so coldly received throughout the country that little has been done since but to indulge in vague complaints and to make impracticable suggestions. The measures taken to supply the public need have therefore necessarily been partial, irregular, unsystematic. Necessarily, too, have the results been incomplete, causing dissatisfaction, disappointment, and legitimate anxiety for the future. Voluntary effort, supplemented by public money, has, it is admitted on all sides, left thousands of rural parishes either without schools or with bad schools, and has failed to reach effectually large and populous districts, the abodes of the poorest and most ignorant, in our metropolis and great cities. Yet men of the most undoubted worth and ability are still divided in opinion as to whether this failure is temporary and accidental, due to imperfect arrangements and incomplete development, and therefore to be met by patient persistence in improving the existing machinery of education; or whether it is inherent in the principle on which we have hitherto acted, and therefore only to be overcome by the substitution of a new system, or at least by some additional organisation.

The advocates of our existing voluntary system point to the great increase in the number of our schools, to the improvement in their character, to the growing intelligence and zeal of our people, who, they affirm, will, as they awaken to a sense of their wants, take measures to supply them. They insist upon the inappreciable value of the voluntary principle, the life and warmth and animation which it imparts to all that it touches, and the danger of substituting for it the cold mechanical action of a general compulsory system. They dwell upon the fact that the great increase of education among the poorer classes has been mainly due to the efforts of religious zeal, and they warn us to beware of replacing that powerful motive by the agency of a less animating and more material principle. The adoption of a compulsory education rate would, they argue, even if enforced only where everything else had failed, lead to the speedy extinction of voluntary zeal. With the aid of time, and by a relaxation of the conditions on which the Government grant is dispensed, they indulge a diffident, hesitating hope of seeing the wants of the people ultimately supplied.

The advocates of a more comprehensive and more systematic scheme of national education, on the other hand, point to the fact that, after all that has been said written and done

during the last thirty years, a large portion of our population is still allowed to grow up ignorant and untrained. Admitting the increase of schools in number, and their improvement in quality, they assert that experience has proved the incapacity of the voluntary system to bring education home to those who need it most. They affirm that it has succeeded only where success was comparatively easy, and the need least pressing; that it has failed where the difficulties were greatest and the need sorest. They argue that it is irrational to make the education of a district dependent upon the idiosyncrasy of a landlord or clergyman, or the accidental devotion of some public-spirited individual. Admitting, for the sake of argument, that in process of time, and with some improvement in our existing machinery, education might gradually permeate our whole population, they ask, in how many generations may this hope reasonably be expected to be fulfilled? and whether this sort of patience is really a virtue which Christian men ought to practise? While we wait for a millennium, which may never come, are tens of thousands of innocent children to be allowed to grow up in ignorance and vice, in that intellectual and moral debasement, which those only know who, like Howard, "have surveyed the mansions of sorrow and pain, have taken the guage and dimensions of misery, depression, and contempt; have remembered the forgotten, attended to the neglected, and visited the forsaken?" Under no system, they urge, which could possibly be adopted in this country, could voluntary effort be dispensed with, or religious zeal be wanting. The rate levied to erect or maintain a school, would, they acknowledge, be of little use, if good and earnest men ceased to devote themselves to the management of its affairs, and they ask whether the compulsory provision of educational funds has damped voluntary ardour in the United States, or whether, as a matter of fact, the very highest examples of well-directed, voluntary devotion, may not be found in the managing committees of the schools of New England, New York, and Pennsylvania? They do not deny that the denominational system affords a stimulus which would be wanting to an education supplied by means of a public rate. That is an unfortunate result of our religious divisions; but an imperfect education is better than the heathenism of utter ignorance; and zealous ministers would find means to supply the deficiency of dogmatic teaching in our schools.

Such is a brief and meagre outline of the arguments employed on either side of this great and difficult controversy.

* Burke.

Dependent upon its decision is another question of great importance and equal difficulty. When a sufficient supply of schools has been secured, shall the attendance of children of a certain age be voluntary or compulsory? Are we to rely upon the parents' sense of duty, or are we to call in the aid of the law, in order to compel those who neglect their duty to perform it? The advocates of compulsion point to the undoubted fact that, even where ample provision for education exists, thousands of children are deprived of its benefits, sometimes by the wilful neglect or stolid indifference of the parents, sometimes by their poverty. This is the common experience of all large communities; but nowhere, I believe, have the facts been so carefully ascertained as in this great city in which we are now assembled. That excellent institution, the Manchester and Salford Education Aid Society (an institution which affords an example for imitation in every town of the kingdom), has for its objects, first, in respect of existing schools, to pay for the children of poor parents so much of the school fees as may be needful; and, secondly, by aiding (and, if it should be deemed advisable, by establishing) free schools for the children of parents who are unable to pay any portion of the school fees. In the fulfilment of these objects they have taken steps for a systematic canvass of the town. This inquiry has, as yet, only been completed in some districts, but the facts ascertained, thus far, are so interesting and important, and bear so directly on the subject under discussion, that I must ask your patience while I refer to some of them.

The results hitherto obtained in the examined districts have been "singularly uniform. Everywhere a majority of the children between the ages of three and twelve are found to be neither at school nor at work." This was not owing to the poverty of the parents, for "in many districts" (I quote from the report of this year) "the number of children who are not sent to school, but whose parents are able to pay school fees if they were willing, approaches very nearly to the number of those who are neglected on account of poverty." In one district, out of 142 children not at school, only 31 were found to belong to parents too poor to pay for their education. In the districts already examined, of 5,787 children neither at school nor at work, 2,175 had parents able to pay for them, 3,612 were the children of parents unable to do so. In other words, out of every 19 children absent from school, 7 were so by the wilful negligence, 12 by the poverty of their parents. The 3,612 receive aid from the society, but the whole of the 2,175 are necessarily passed over;