Now we are all for difficult things in teaching, but this is not a difficulty, it is a hindrance. It is to spur and to curb a boy at the same moment. If you want a boy to think, untie his mind and let him think in his own language. If you want him to express himself with terseness and elegance in another language, don't ask him to think at the same time. We speak from personal experience. We doubt if there is anything in the world more futile and ridiculous than the three or four hundred things called "themes" which find their way every week at Eton from the boys' bureaus to the master's desk. It would be curious to reckon up in any given week how many of them begin with omnes homines, and, after a convulsive and despairing struggle through fourteen lines, end with faciunt.

And then verses-another cherished institution. We have great faith in verse-making, Greek and Latin, and especially Latin; but we have no faith in it as practised in our schools. What can be more silly than to start, first, with the assumption that every boy in the school is an imaginative boy; and, secondly, that he is competent to exercise his imaginative power and to express it gracefully, according to the laws of metre, in languages to know something of which is his daily struggle? Why, it is just as in the case of the "theme." You are asking the boy to do two things at the same time which should not be attempted at the same time, and cannot be done well, unless in exceptional cases, at the same time. Asking him for both, you are hindering both. If the boy has any imagination, why cramp it by the necessity of expressing it in a difficult shape? If he has not got any imagination, why hinder him in polishing his language by making him hunt for thoughts? The rule, applicable to ninety-nine boys out of a hundred, for writing Greek and Latin verses, is translation from English poetry; not what is called, by school courtesy, original composition.

Then learning by heart-an excellent thing. But why is it to be all verse that is learnt? Learning prose by heart is a far more effectual process for mastering a language, and supplies the memory with much more of idiomatic expression. It may be doubted, too, whether it be not equally improving to the taste. It is also more difficult-a point always to be kept in sight.

But the greater part of time in school is spent in construing Greek and Latin books into English. Now we hold that of all ways this is the least calculated to teach a boy Greek and Latin, at once the most irksome and the least profitable. And the experience of public school-boys may be appealed to, whether it be not true that of all the time that they are at school the time that is passed in school, when some few of a class are construing and the rest doing nothing but making as much noise as they can without getting put in the bill," is not the time most thrown away?

These processes, with some writing of "exercises," make up the appliances of our schools for teaching Greek and Latin from six to eighteen.

The result is bad. It is wonderful that anybody should ever have imagined it could be anything else. Hinc ille lacryme. Hence the ignorant impatience of Greek and Latin so widely prevailing;

hence also, where it exists, the deliberate impatience. Now what we say is that it is the system of teaching, or rather of pretending to teach, which has to bear the blame for having provoked the impatience not only of those who do not know what the value and use of Greek and Latin is, but of many who do know it. There will always be plenty of people in the world who want to get quickly at results by a coarse and vulgar process, and who think that the point to be gained by sending a boy to school is to turn him out ready-made for this or that walk in life. These people, men and women, will always declaim against Greek and Latin. But there is neither wisdom nor kindness in swelling their ranks with sensible people, who do know something about education-what it is and how it should be doneby so futile an application of their best machine that they give up the matter in despair.

The real way of teaching and learning a language forms, so to speak, no part of our school method. Perhaps, there may be, here and there, exceptions with which we are not acquainted. True, it is not an easy way for the teacher. True, it requires an accurate and thorough and finished scholar. But then, when people pay the prices they do pay for their boys at school, they have a right to demand that they shall be supplied with the best teaching power. A school of eight hundred boys requires not less than thirty-two teachers to work it, as it should be worked, in Greek and Latin; and at the present rate of charges this number would be provided for sufficiently and handsomely.

The way we mean is the way of oral translation. That is, rendering viva voce, without assistance, a good English prose author into Greek or Latin.

in

be

We would have at least two hours in the day allotted to this process. The teacher of the class to tell each boy from time to time to bring into school the same volume of some English prose writer in school to begin with the head boy, and call upon him to render a sentence into Greek or Latin, as the case may be. If he cannot, or makes any gross blunder, to call upon the next, and see if he can take his place. If there is no actual failure, or gross blunder, to correct, when necessary, point of idiom; to improve and polish in point of elegance; to ascertain accuracy in point of grammar. Many boys might be called upon in an hour. When the class next meets begin where you left off in it, always varying the that there passage, no power of previous preparation upon it. People who have never practised this way teaching Greek and Latin will be much surprised to find how speedily it tells upon a boy who has, when he begins, very little knowledge indeed of either. It is very interesting; very nerving to emulation. The steps made in it are not easily forgotten; and it has a power of correcting and improving the taste, and of imparting an accurate and familiar acquaintance with the language, which does not belong to construing and parsing. We doubt whether in a school where it is practised, boys would be found to say that the time passed in school is the time most thrown away.

may

We would not be understood as wishing to discard construing and parsing; much less written translation, properly handled; for, next to oral

of

does this proclamation show no love for the slaves, but that it rivets their chains, by an express acknowledgment of their lawfulness. It is plain that this proposed emancipation of them in the seceding States can only be proclaimed on the ground that they are lawful property: that, in short, rebels may be deprived of them just as (provided only that confiscation can be enforced) they may of the rest of their property of other kinds.

The measure can have no other foundation in the mind of the President himself; for, if he regarded slavery (as we, by the most costly sacrifice ever made by a nation have shown that we regard it) as a sin and a crime, he could not propose to relieve the States in rebellion of that guilt, and to appropriate it to those which still honour his authority priate it to those which still honour his authority with loyal and dutiful obedience. He therefore, by this edict, establishes the principle, as far as any words of his can establish it, that slaves are as lawful property as houses or land; and, whatever the abolitionists, who are reported to approve of the proclamation may profess to think, by the establishment of such a principle he proposes to render slavery eternal in every State that shall return to its allegiance before the opening of the coming year. That none will return, and that therefore, so far at least, the proclamation will be inoperative, takes nothing from its guilt and folly. We cannot know whether these considerations have hitherto escaped Mr. Lincoln's notice; but one consideration has manifestly escaped it, which is that this proclamation goes to change entirely the character of the war, as, in one most important point of view, he he has hitherto sought to represent it to the European powers. Among the grounds on which the sympathy of Europe, and more especially of Great Britain, for the Federal Government, was at first imperiously claimed was this, that the war which it was waging was a war of Free States against Slaveholding States. Henceforward, if this proclamation is to be effectual, the character of both will be altered. The Southerners will be the Free States: the North will be the land of slavery. Should such a change take place, it will inevitably have a considerable effect on this side of the Atlantic. Hitherto the neutrality professed by England has been real; the view taken of the contest has been one of admirable impartiality-while we have failed to see how, on the principles on which the independence of the United States themselves was originally founded, the right of the Secessionist States to claim a separate independence of their own, can be logically denied, we at the same time have acknowledged it to be natural that the Washington Government should be slow to recognize such a right, should be unwilling to acquiesce in their territory suffering so large a diminution; seeing in that diminution a loss of power, and wealth, and influence to themselves, just as even Lord Chatham resisted to the last the recognition of American independence as a death-blow to English greatness; and if the organs of public opinion in England, whether orators or journalists, have from time to time expressed a belief that the time for pacification had arrived, it was because, judging from what happened to ourselves in a similar case, they saw, and see, that, in such a contest, triumph for

the North is hopeless, and that several millions of people resolved to be independent are too large a body to be kept in subjection by any exertion of military power. But should Mr. Lincoln's procla mation ever prove anything but a mere form of empty words-should Secessionist States come any over to him-should slavery, in consequence, be formally adopted as a settled and active principle of the Washington Government, it is manifest that the view with which the English people will thenceforth regard the merits of the contest will be greatly altered; and that the abhorrence of slavery, which in this happy land is no simulated nor partial feeling, will have a great, if not a preponderating, influence on the decision which our Government may next year be forced to form on the already agitated ne question of the recognition of the Southern States as, what not the least considered member of the Cabinet has already ventured to call them, a sepa

rate nation.

The Conscience Clause.

HE Committee of the National Society professes great horror of a "Conscience Clause." The Secretary assures us that the only bar to its compulsory introduction by the Committee of Council, is the adoption by Churchmen of that interpretation of the terms of union, which we repudiate as new and strange. But has the Committee of the National Society or their Secretary asked themselves what a "Conscience Clause" really is? It is a provision to overrule the conscience of the founders, managers, and teachers of a school, by the conscience of a parent who may wish to take his own advantage of their services in the instruction of his child. One man conscientiously thinks that there ought to be no other binding rule for the religious instruction of the scholars than the reading of the Bible. He is free to devote his money and his time to the founding or managing schools on that footing. He may incorporate his principle in a Trust-deed which shall be binding on all who come after him. This is the practice of the British and Foreign School Society, and the Committee of Council never dreams of interfering with it. No one is listened to who wants to send his child to such a school without learning the Bible, or who requires his child to be taught the Catechism there. Either demand would be contrary to the principles of the school and the conscience of those who established it. Another man conscientiously thinks it right to teach the Catechism and the Liturgy in addition to the Bible. He wishes to devote his money and labour to a Church School, and he provides regulations to effect his object in like manner. This is-or this wasthe principle and the practice of the National Society. But the Committee of Council refuses to allow to these consciences the liberty enjoyed by the other class. It sets up against them the possible conscience of some unknown parent. It obiects to any rule or regulation for securing a Church education. It demands the insertion of a clause by which any one shall be entitled to share all the secular benefits of a Church School, while rejecting the religious teaching

taining Terms of Union of which they deny the obvious signification, and setting country clergymen to fight a battle with their right hands tied up. We write thus plainly in order to force the subject on the attention of the Committee. Every one knows how often a little knot of members act as "the Committee;" how easily a snug coterie is persuaded to regard as a clever bit of policy what to people out of doors looks very like treachery; how stubbornly officials entrench themselves against remonstrances from mere subscribers. But the matter is getting serious: no sensible man doubts that a mistake has been made, and the sooner it is acknowledged the better for the Society's character and funds. Why should the bishops wish to bring us all up in arms at the next anniversary? Cannot they call a general meeting and discuss the question while it may be done amicably? Or, better still, cannot they prevent further discussion by doing the right thing at once? The mischief has been greatly increased by the Secretary's letters. To contend that "the children" does not mean mean "all the children," and that "all the children" is different from "all the children without exception," is simply contemptible as a piece of logic: if supposed to indicate a "policy" the trifling becomes alarming. Then (as Sir John Coleridge has well observed) "the Catechism does not mean all the Catechism, nor the Bible all the Bible, nor the Lord's Day every Lord's Day. Psha!"

The defence of the Committee should have been that the passage first complained of in the Memorandum of the 23rd of July, 1860, was a mistake, incautiously advanced in discussion with the Committee of Council, and unfairly taken up and extended by their lordships in the Colchester case. It was only to say this to the Council Office and to the Society and the discussion would have been quashed. This must be said after all, though the Secretary has rendered it more difficult by his injudicious letters. No one, out of Downing Street, will thank him for telling us that children not having sponsors cannot be taught the Catechism. Is this also to be turned into an authorized exposition and made a condition of the public grant? Or does Mr. Lonsdale think it his duty to act as general referee on all rubrical and ecclesiastical questions?

It is time to put a stop to this: the case is too plain for further argument. Difficult as some people may have made it for themselves, the Committee has but one course to pursue if their Association is to continue the School Society of the Church of England.

The Use and Abuse of Party.

conduct of Constitutional Government. These two great men, it must be owned, enjoyed unequal opportunities of testing the real nature of party. Bolingbroke, more essentially a man of action than Burke, looking only to the facts of the period, and finding a very ugly set of facts before him, never paused to reflect whether the abuses which he then witnessed might not be the ungainly movements of a new system just struggling into life, and not, as he thought, the inaugural symptoms of a new æra of corruption. Fifty years later our two great political parties were getting well into harness; the capabilities of the system were better understood: and it had become apparent to most thinking men that it constituted at once the best security for a strong government, and at the same time the steadiest barrier against the despotism of a single individual, whether subject or sovereign. Still, there can be no doubt that many of those evils which Bolingbroke saw so clearly, however much thrown into the shade by the development of still greater advantages, are inherent in the nature of party government, and ready to break forth again whenever the weakness of Parliament shall tempt the lurking malady to show itself.

The one abuse of party which assumed such gi gantic proportions in the eyes of the great Tory statesman was the facility which it afforded to a particular set of men to accomplish their own ends at the expense of the national welfare. No political party, he thought, could regard the whole nation from the same lofty and disinterested point of view as a king could. Without stopping to argue the feasibility or non-feasibility of "The Patriot King," or to compare the evils of Party with the evils of Absolutism, we may say at once that there is truth in the objection here raised and a truth which has not lost its vitality even in our own times. The legal and ecclesiastical appointments, for instance, of the last fifteen years would not probably have been made even by Lord Russell, and certainly not by Lord Palmerston, had they been unfettered by party connections. pointments, then, were not for the public good, but for the good of the Whigs; and are perfectly fair illustrations of the mischiefs pointed out by Lord Bolingbroke. Again, an analogous evil is the necessity under which Lord Palmerston has felt himself to retain Mr. Gladstone as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Why has he been obliged to do this? Simply because he cannot throw himself upon the good sense of the House at large, but must consult the wishes and the interests of only little more than one half of it.

These ap

Burke.

wax cold, and a general languor seize upon the whole connection. These dangers must be combated by every means at the disposal of party