a week by working seven days than by working six days. But I very much
doubt whether, at the end of a year, he will generally have produced
more by working seven days a week than by working six days a week; and
I firmly believe that, at the end of twenty years, he will have produced
much less by working seven days a week than by working six days a week.
In the same manner I do not deny that a factory child will produce more,
in a single day, by working twelve hours than by working ten hours, and
by working fifteen hours than by working twelve hours. But I do deny
that a great society in which children work fifteen, or even twelve
hours a day will, in the lifetime of a generation, produce as much as
if those children had worked less. If we consider man merely in a
commercial point of view, if we consider him merely as a machine for
the production of worsted and calico, let us not forget what a piece of
mechanism he is, how fearfully and wonderfully made. We do not treat a
fine horse or a sagacious dog exactly as we treat a spinning jenny. Nor
will any slaveholder, who has sense enough to know his own interest,
treat his human chattels exactly as he treats his horses and his dogs.
And would you treat the free labourer of England like a mere wheel or
pulley? Rely on it that intense labour, beginning too early in life,
continued too long every day, stunting the growth of the body, stunting
the growth of the mind, leaving no time for healthful exercise, leaving
no time for intellectual culture, must impair all those high qualities
which have made our country great. Your overworked boys will become a
feeble and ignoble race of men, the parents of a more feeble and more
ignoble progeny; nor will it be long before the deterioration of the
labourer will injuriously affect those very interests to which his
physical and moral energies have been sacrificed. On the other hand,
a day of rest recurring in every week, two or three hours of leisure,
exercise, innocent amusement or useful study, recurring every day, must
improve the whole man, physically, morally, intellectually; and the
improvement of the man will improve all that the man produces. Why is
it, Sir, that the Hindoo cotton manufacturer, close to whose door
the cotton grows, cannot, in the bazaar of his own town, maintain
a competition with the English cotton manufacturer, who has to send
thousands of miles for the raw material, and who has then to send the
wrought material thousands of miles to market? You will say that it is
owing to the excellence of our machinery. And to what is the excellence
of our machinery owing? How many of the improvements which have been
made in our machinery do we owe to the ingenuity and patient thought of
working men? Adam Smith tells us in the first chapter of his great work,
that you can hardly go to a factory without seeing some very pretty
machine,--that is his expression,--devised by some labouring man.
Hargraves, the inventor of the spinning jenny, was a common artisan.
Crompton, the inventor of the mule jenny, was a working man. How many
hours of the labour of children would do so much for our manufactures as
one of these improvements has done? And in what sort of society are such
improvements most likely to be made? Surely in a society in which the
faculties of the working people are developed by education. How long
will you wait before any negro, working under the lash in Louisiana,
will contrive a better machinery for squeezing the sugar canes?
My honourable friend seems to me, in all his reasonings about the
commercial prosperity of nations, to overlook entirely the chief cause
on which that prosperity depends. What is it, Sir, that makes the great
difference between country and country? Not the exuberance of soil; not
the mildness of climate; not mines, nor havens, nor rivers. These things
are indeed valuable when put to their proper use by human intelligence:
but human intelligence can do much without them; and they without human
intelligence can do nothing. They exist in the highest degree in regions
of which the inhabitants are few, and squalid, and barbarous, and naked,
and starving; while on sterile rocks, amidst unwholesome marshes, and
under inclement skies, may be found immense populations, well fed, well
lodged, well clad, well governed. Nature meant Egypt and Sicily to be
the gardens of the world. They once were so. Is it anything in the earth
or in the air that makes Scotland more prosperous than Egypt, that makes
Holland more prosperous than Sicily? No; it was the Scotchman that made
Scotland; it was the Dutchman that made Holland. Look at North America.
Two centuries ago the sites on which now arise mills, and hotels, and
banks, and colleges, and churches, and the Senate Houses of flourishing
commonwealths, were deserts abandoned to the panther and the bear. What
has made the change? Was it the rich mould, or the redundant rivers? No:
the prairies were as fertile, the Ohio and the Hudson were as broad
and as full then as now. Was the improvement the effect of some great
transfer of capital from the old world to the new? No, the emigrants
generally carried out with them no more than a pittance; but they
carried out the English heart, and head, and arm; and the English heart
and head and arm turned the wilderness into cornfield and orchard, and
the huge trees of the primeval forest into cities and fleets. Man, man
is the great instrument that produces wealth. The natural difference
between Campania and Spitzbergen is trifling, when compared with the
difference between a country inhabited by men full of bodily and
mental vigour, and a country inhabited by men sunk in bodily and mental
decrepitude. Therefore it is that we are not poorer but richer, because
we have, through many ages, rested from our labour one day in seven.
That day is not lost. While industry is suspended, while the plough lies
in the furrow, while the Exchange is silent, while no smoke ascends from
the factory, a process is going on quite as important to the wealth of
nations as any process which is performed on more busy days. Man,
the machine of machines, the machine compared with which all the
contrivances of the Watts and the Arkwrights are worthless, is repairing
and winding up, so that he returns to his labours on the Monday with
clearer intellect, with livelier spirits, with renewed corporal
vigour. Never will I believe that what makes a population stronger, and
healthier, and wiser, and better, can ultimately make it poorer. You try
to frighten us by telling us, that in some German factories, the young
work seventeen hours in the twenty-four, that they work so hard that
among thousands there is not one who grows to such a stature that he can
be admitted into the army; and you ask whether, if we pass this bill, we
can possibly hold our own against such competition as this? Sir, I laugh
at the thought of such competition. If ever we are forced to yield the
foremost place among commercial nations, we shall yield it, not to a
race of degenerate dwarfs, but to some people pre-eminently vigorous in
body and in mind.
For these reasons, Sir, I approve of the principle of this bill, and
shall, without hesitation, vote for the second reading. To what extent
we ought to reduce the hours of labour is a question of more difficulty.
I think that we are in the situation of a physician who has satisfied
himself that there is a disease, and that there is a specific medicine
for the disease, but who is not certain what quantity of that medicine
the patient's constitution will bear. Such a physician would probably
administer his remedy by small doses, and carefully watch its operation.
I cannot help thinking that, by at once reducing the hours of labour
from twelve to ten, we should hazard too much. The change is great, and
ought to be cautiously and gradually made. Suppose that there should be
an immediate fall of wages, which is not impossible. Might there not
be a violent reaction? Might not the public take up a notion that our
legislation had been erroneous in principle, though, in truth, our error
would have been an error, not of principle, but merely of degree? 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.