I
_EDUCATION AND THE JUDGE_
Not long ago a Judge of the High Court (who was also a Liberal)
made what struck me as an eminently wise observation. While trying
a couple of Elementary School-teachers whose obscenity was too
gross for even an Old Bailey audience, and who themselves were
products of Elementary Schools, the Judge said: "It almost makes
one hesitate to think that elementary education is the blessing which
we had hoped it was." Of course, all the prigs of the educational
world, and they are not few, were aghast at this robust declaration
of common sense; and the Judge thought it well to explain (not,
I am thankful to say, to explain away) a remark which had been
sedulously misconstrued.
Long years ago Queen Victoria recording the conversation at her
dinner-table, said: "Lord Melbourne made us laugh very much with
his opinions about Schools and Public Education; the latter he
don't like, and when I asked him if he did he said, 'I daren't
say in these times that I'm against it--but I _am_ against it.'"
There is a pleasantly human touch in that confession of a Whig
Prime Minister, that he was afraid to avow his mistrust of a great
social policy to which the Liberal party was committing itself. The
arch-charlatan, Lord Brougham, was raging up and down the kingdom
extolling the unmixed blessings of education. The University of
London, which was to make all things new, had just been set up.
"The school-master was abroad." Lord John Russell was making some
tentative steps towards a system of national education. Societies,
Congresses, and Institutes were springing up like mushrooms; and
all enlightened people agreed that extension of knowledge was the
one and all-sufficient remedy for the obvious disorders of the body
politic. The Victorian Age was, in brief, the age of Education;
and the one dogma which no one ventured to question was that the
extension of knowledge was necessarily, and in itself, a blessing.
When I say "no one" I should perhaps say "hardly anyone"; for the
wisest and wittiest man of the time saw the crack in the foundation
on which his friends were laboriously erecting the temple of their
new divinity. "Reading and writing," said Sydney Smith, "are mere
increase of power. They may be turned, I admit, to a good or a
bad purpose; but for several years of his life the child is in
your hands, and you may give to that power what bias you please. I
believe the arm of the assassin may be often stayed by the lessons
of his early life. When I see the village school, and the tattered
scholars, and the aged master or mistress teaching the mechanical
art of reading or writing, and thinking that they are teaching
that alone, I feel that the aged instructor is protecting life,
insuring property, fencing the Altar, guarding the Throne, giving
space and liberty to all the fine powers of man, and lifting him
up to his own place in the order of Creation."
That first sentence contain? the pith of the whole matter. "Reading
and writing are mere increase of power," and they may be turned
to a good or a bad purpose. Here enters the ethical consideration
which the zealots of sheer knowledge so persistently ignored. The
language about fencing the Altar and guarding the Throne might, no
doubt, strike the Judge who tried the school-teachers as unduly
idealistic; but the sentiment is sound, and knowledge is either
a blessing or a curse, according as it is used.
Sydney Smith was speaking of the Elementary School, and, indeed,
was urging the claims of the working classes to better education.
But his doctrine applies with at least equal force to the higher
and wider ranges of knowledge. During the Victorian Age physical
science came into its own, and a good deal more than its own. Any
discovery in mechanics or chemistry was hailed as a fresh boon,
and the discoverer was ranged, with Wilberforce and Shaftesbury,
among our national heroes. As long ago as 1865 a scientific soldier
perceived the possibilities of aerial navigation. His vision has
been translated into fact; but Count Zeppelin has shown us quite
clearly that the discovery is not an unmixed blessing. Chemistry
is, to some minds, the most interesting of studies, just because
it is, as Lord Salisbury once said of it, the science of things
as they are. Yet aconitine, strychnine, and antimony have played
their part in murders, and chloroform has been used for destruction
as well as for salvation. Dr. Lardner was one of the most conspicuous
figures in that March of Mind which Brougham and his congeners
led; and his researches into chemistry resulted in the production
of an effluvium which was calculated to destroy all human life
within five miles of the spot where it was discharged. This was
an enlargement of knowledge; but if there had been Nihilists in
the reign of William IV. they would have found in Dr. Lardner's
discovery a weapon ready to their hand. Someone must have discovered
alcohol; and my teetotal friends would probably say, invented it,
for they cannot attribute so diabolical an agency to the action of
purely natural causes. But even those who least sympathize with
"the lean and sallow abstinence" would scarcely maintain that alcohol
has been an unmixed blessing to the race.
To turn from material to mental discoveries, I hold that a great
many additions which have been made to our philosophical knowledge
have diminished alike the happiness and the usefulness of those
who made them. "To live a life of the deepest pessimism tempered
only by the highest mathematics" is a sad result of sheer knowledge.
An historian, toiling terribly in the muniment-rooms of colleges
or country houses, makes definite additions to our knowledge of
Henry VIII. or Charles I.; learns cruelty from the one and perfidy
from the other, and emerges with a theory of government as odious
as Carlyle's or Froude's. A young student of religion diligently
adds to his stock of learning, and plunges into the complicated
errors of Manicheans, and Sabellians, and Pelagians, with the result
that he absorbs the heresies and forgets the Gospel. In each of
these cases knowledge has been increased, but mankind has not been
benefited. We come back to what Sydney Smith said. Increase of
knowledge is merely increase of power. Whether it is to be a boon
or a curse to humanity depends absolutely on the spirit in which
it is applied. Just now we find ourselves engaged in a desperate
conflict between materialism and morality--between consummate knowledge
organized for evil ends, and the sublime ideal of public right.
Education has done for Germany all that Education, divorced from
Morality, can do; and the result has been a defeat of civilization
and a destruction of human happiness such as Europe has not seen
since the Middle Age closed in blood. What shall it profit a nation
if it "gain the whole world" and lose its own soul?