{11} The above tables, it is right to say, have been obtained by
subtracting Mr. Mann’s tables relating to the Church from the tables
relating to places of worship in the aggregate.
{19} It is right to say that the decennial periods do not exactly agree.
In Mr. Mann’s tables they are from 1801–11, &c.; in Mr. Bright’s return,
from 1800–10, &c. It is not, however, apprehended that this circumstance
would materially affect the calculation.
{25} Neale estimates the Nonconformists, in the time of Charles II., at
a hundred and fifty thousand families, or three quarters of a million
persons; in other words, at about a sixth of the population. If the
Dissenters had in 1801 only 881,240 sittings, their number of morning
attendants would be considerably less than 400,000; and, allowing each
attendant to represent three persons, that would give a Dissenting
population of about 1,100,000.
{26} The faculty of reasoning correctly in figures is not so ordinary an
accomplishment as might have been supposed. Even so intelligent a writer
as Mr. Henry Mayhew prints, at page 391 of his “Great World of London,” a
table, of which the following is a specimen:—
1842. Can neither Can read
read nor only (percent)
write (percent).
Convicted at assizes 39.79 27.21
and sessions
Convicted—summarily 39.90 21.65
Average 39.84 24.43
—the average being found by adding together the two lines and dividing
the sum by two. It need hardly, however, be pointed out that the result
so arrived at could not be true unless the number of persons in each
class was exactly the same. A man who had invested in the Great Western
Railway £900 which yielded him two per cent., and £100 in the South
Western which paid him six, might say, on Mr. Mayhew’s principle, that he
had invested £1000 at 4 per cent; but he would soon find out that he
would have to receive only £24 for his yearly dividend instead of
£40—£2.8 percent. instead of £4.
{27} Mr. Mann calculates that without in the least interfering with
juvenile labour, and without questioning the discretion of parents who
kept children between the ages of 3 and 5 and 12 and 15 at home, there
ought to have been more than three million children at school in 1851.
It would be easy to show that this estimate is based upon nothing better
than a series of blunders and bad guesses, but there is a much shorter
mode of dealing with it. The children of the middle and upper classes do
not remain under professional instructors at home or at school for a
longer average period than six years. Now, the total number of children
in 1851 between the ages of 4 and 10 was 2,484,866, or 13.8 per cent. of
the entire population. The number actually on the school books was
2,200,000, or 12.2 per cent. So that either all the children in the
country were at school, but the average time was one-eighth too short; or
the average time was of the right length, but the number of scholars was
one-eighth too few. The truth, of course, lay somewhere between these
two alternatives. Since 1851 considerable progress has no doubt been
made; but it unfortunately turns out that the effect of improved
machinery is not to improve the general education, but merely to shorten
the time allotted to schooling. It is found that if by better modes of
tuition a child can be made sooner to acquire what its parents think
sufficient for it to know, it is only so much the sooner taken away. It
would therefore be vain to expect that the school per centage will ever
be much higher than it was in 1851—at least, until the middle classes
raise their own standard. Of the children on the schoolbooks in 1851,
the per centage of actual daily attendants was 83—91 for the private, and
79 for the public scholar. In America, where the schools are wholly
free, the per centage was still less. In Massachusetts, for example, it
was only 75. In other words, the attendance in England and Wales in 1851
was 1,826,000 daily. If the 2,200,000 had all been private scholars, it
would have been 2,002,000. On the other hand if there had been 2,400,000
free scholars, it would only have been 1,800,000. These figures will
speak for themselves.
{33} The number of additional clergy ordained every year is stated to be
300. The number required to maintain the proportion of clergy to
population which existed in 1851 would be under 200.