evening. The first duty which I performed, as a Member of the Committee
of Council which is charged with the superintendence of public
instruction, was to give my hearty assent to the plan which the
honourable Member for Finsbury calls on the House to condemn. I am one
of those who have been accused in every part of the kingdom, and who are
now accused in Parliament, of aiming, under specious pretences, a
blow at the civil and religious liberties of the people. It is natural
therefore that I should seize the earliest opportunity of vindicating
myself from so grave a charge.
The honourable Member for Finsbury must excuse me if, in the remarks
which I have to offer to the House, I should not follow very closely the
order of his speech. The truth is that a mere answer to his speech would
be no defence of myself or of my colleagues. I am surprised, I own, that
a man of his acuteness and ability should, on such an occasion, have
made such a speech. The country is excited from one end to the other by
a great question of principle. On that question the Government has taken
one side. The honourable Member stands forth as the chosen and trusted
champion of a great party which takes the other side. We expected to
hear from him a full exposition of the views of those in whose name he
speaks. But, to our astonishment, he has scarcely even alluded to the
controversy which has divided the whole nation. He has entertained us
with sarcasms and personal anecdotes: he has talked much about matters
of mere detail: but I must say that, after listening with close
attention to all that he has said, I am quite unable to discover
whether, on the only important point which is in issue, he agrees
with us or with that large and active body of Nonconformists which is
diametrically opposed to us. He has sate down without dropping one word
from which it is possible to discover whether he thinks that education
is or that it is not a matter with which the State ought to interfere.
Yet that is the question about which the whole nation has, during
several weeks, been writing, reading, speaking, hearing, thinking,
petitioning, and on which it is now the duty of Parliament to pronounce
a decision. That question once settled, there will be, I believe,
very little room for dispute. If it be not competent to the State to
interfere with the education of the people, the mode of interference
recommended by the Committee of Council must of course be condemned.
If it be the right and the duty of the State to make provision for the
education of the people, the objections made to our plan will, in a very
few words, be shown to be frivolous.
I shall take a course very different from that which has been taken
by the honourable gentleman. I shall in the clearest manner profess
my opinion on that great question of principle which he has studiously
evaded; and for my opinion I shall give what seem to me to be
unanswerable reasons.
I believe, Sir, that it is the right and the duty of the State to
provide means of education for the common people. This proposition seems
to me to be implied in every definition that has ever yet been given of
the functions of a government. About the extent of those functions there
has been much difference of opinion among ingenious men. There are some
who hold that it is the business of a government to meddle with every
part of the system of human life, to regulate trade by bounties and
prohibitions, to regulate expenditure by sumptuary laws, to regulate
literature by a censorship, to regulate religion by an inquisition.
Others go to the opposite extreme, and assign to government a very
narrow sphere of action. But the very narrowest sphere that ever was
assigned to governments by any school of political philosophy is quite
wide enough for my purpose. On one point all the disputants are agreed.
They unanimously acknowledge that it is the duty of every government
to take order for giving security to the persons and property of the
members of the community.
This being admitted, can it be denied that the education of the common
people is a most effectual means of securing our persons and our
property? Let Adam Smith answer that question for me. His authority,
always high, is, on this subject, entitled to peculiar respect, because
he extremely disliked busy, prying, interfering governments. He was for
leaving literature, arts, sciences, to take care of themselves. He was
not friendly to ecclesiastical establishments. He was of opinion, that
the State ought not to meddle with the education of the rich. But he has
expressly told us that a distinction is to be made, particularly in a
commercial and highly civilised society, between the education of the
rich and the education of the poor. The education of the poor, he
says, is a matter which deeply concerns the commonwealth. Just as the
magistrate ought to interfere for the purpose of preventing the leprosy
from spreading among the people, he ought to interfere for the purpose
of stopping the progress of the moral distempers which are inseparable
from ignorance. Nor can this duty be neglected without danger to the
public peace. If you leave the multitude uninstructed, there is serious
risk that religious animosities may produce the most dreadful disorders.
The most dreadful disorders! Those are Adam Smith's own words; and
prophetic words they were. Scarcely had he given this warning to
our rulers when his prediction was fulfilled in a manner never to be
forgotten. I speak of the No Popery riots of 1780. I do not know that I
could find in all history a stronger proof of the proposition, that the
ignorance of the common people makes the property, the limbs, the lives
of all classes insecure. Without the shadow of a grievance, at the
summons of a madman, a hundred thousand people rise in insurrection.
During a whole week, there is anarchy in the greatest and wealthiest
of European cities. The parliament is besieged. Your predecessor sits
trembling in his chair, and expects every moment to see the door beaten
in by the ruffians whose roar he hears all round the house. The peers
are pulled out of their coaches. The bishops in their lawn are forced to
fly over the tiles. The chapels of foreign ambassadors, buildings made
sacred by the law of nations, are destroyed. The house of the Chief
Justice is demolished. The little children of the Prime Minister are
taken out of their beds and laid in their night clothes on the table of
the Horse Guards, the only safe asylum from the fury of the rabble. The
prisons are opened. Highwaymen, housebreakers, murderers, come forth
to swell the mob by which they have been set free. Thirty-six fires are
blazing at once in London. Then comes the retribution. Count up all the
wretches who were shot, who were hanged, who were crushed, who drank
themselves to death at the rivers of gin which ran down Holborn Hill;
and you will find that battles have been lost and won with a smaller
sacrifice of life. And what was the cause of this calamity, a calamity
which, in the history of London, ranks with the great plague and the
great fire? The cause was the ignorance of a population which had been
suffered, in the neighbourhood of palaces, theatres, temples, to grow up
as rude and stupid as any tribe of tattooed cannibals in New Zealand, I
might say as any drove of beasts in Smithfield Market.
The instance is striking: but it is not solitary. To the same cause are
to be ascribed the riots of Nottingham, the sack of Bristol, all the
outrages of Ludd, and Swing, and Rebecca, beautiful and costly machinery
broken to pieces in Yorkshire, barns and haystacks blazing in Kent,
fences and buildings pulled down in Wales. Could such things have been
done in a country in which the mind of the labourer had been opened by
education, in which he had been taught to find pleasure in the exercise
of his intellect, taught to revere his Maker, taught to respect
legitimate authority, and taught at the same time to seek the redress of
real wrongs by peaceful and constitutional means?
This then is my argument. It is the duty of Government to protect our
persons and property from danger. The gross ignorance of the common
people is a principal cause of danger to our persons and property.
Therefore, it is the duty of Government to take care that the common
people shall not be grossly ignorant.
And what is the alternative? It is universally allowed that, by some
means, Government must protect our persons and property. If you take
away education, what means do you leave? You leave means such as only
necessity can justify, means which inflict a fearful amount of pain,
not only on the guilty, but on the innocent who are connected with
the guilty. You leave guns and bayonets, stocks and whipping-posts,
treadmills, solitary cells, penal colonies, gibbets. See then how the
case stands. Here is an end which, as we all agree, governments are
bound to attain. There are only two ways of attaining it. One of those
ways is by making men better, and wiser, and happier. The other way is
by making them infamous and miserable. Can it be doubted which way we
ought to prefer? Is it not strange, is it not almost incredible, that
pious and benevolent men should gravely propound the doctrine that the
magistrate is bound to punish and at the same time bound not to teach?
To me it seems quite clear that whoever has a right to hang has a right
to educate. Can we think without shame and remorse that more than half
of those wretches who have been tied up at Newgate in our time might
have been living happily, that more than half of those who are now in
our gaols might have been enjoying liberty and using that liberty well,
that such a hell on earth as Norfolk Island, need never have existed, if
we had expended in training honest men but a small part of what we have
expended in hunting and torturing rogues.
I would earnestly entreat every gentleman to look at a report which
is contained in the Appendix to the First Volume of the Minutes of
the Committee of Council. I speak of the report made by Mr Seymour
Tremenheare on the state of that part of Monmouthshire which is
inhabited by a population chiefly employed in mining. He found that,
in this district, towards the close of 1839, out of eleven thousand
children who were of an age to attend school, eight thousand never went
to any school at all, and that most of the remaining three thousand
might almost as well have gone to no school as to the squalid hovels in
which men who ought themselves to have been learners pretended to teach.
In general these men had only one qualification for their employment;
and that was their utter unfitness for every other employment. They were
disabled miners, or broken hucksters. In their schools all was stench,
and noise, and confusion. Now and then the clamour of the boys was
silenced for two minutes by the furious menaces of the master; but it
soon broke out again. The instruction given was of the lowest kind. Not
one school in ten was provided with a single map. This is the way in
which you suffered the minds of a great population to be formed. And now
for the effects of your negligence. The barbarian inhabitants of this
region rise in an insane rebellion against the Government. They come
pouring down their valleys to Newport. They fire on the Queen's troops.
They wound a magistrate. The soldiers fire in return; and too many of
these wretched men pay with their lives the penalty of their crime. But
is the crime theirs alone? Is it strange that they should listen to the
only teaching that they had? How can you, who took no pains to instruct
them, blame them for giving ear to the demagogue who took pains to
delude them? We put them down, of course. We punished them. We had no
choice. Order must be maintained; property must be protected; and, since
we had omitted to take the best way of keeping these people quiet, we
were under the necessity of keeping them quiet by the dread of the sword
and the halter. But could any necessity be more cruel? And which of us
would run the risk of being placed under such necessity a second time?
I say, therefore, that the education of the people is not only a means,
but the best means, of attaining that which all allow to be a chief end
of government; and, if this be so, it passes my faculties to understand
how any man can gravely contend that Government has nothing to do with
the education of the people.
My confidence in my opinion is strengthened when I recollect that I hold
that opinion in common with all the greatest lawgivers, statesmen,
and political philosophers of all nations and ages, with all the most
illustrious champions of civil and spiritual freedom, and especially
with those men whose names were once held in the highest veneration
by the Protestant Dissenters of England. I might cite many of the most
venerable names of the old world; but I would rather cite the example
of that country which the supporters of the Voluntary system here are
always recommending to us as a pattern. Go back to the days when the
little society which has expanded into the opulent and enlightened
commonwealth of Massachusetts began to exist. Our modern Dissenters will
scarcely, I think, venture to speak contumeliously of those Puritans
whose spirit Laud and his High Commission Court could not subdue, of
those Puritans who were willing to leave home and kindred, and all the
comforts and refinements of civilised life, to cross the ocean, to
fix their abode in forests among wild beasts and wild men, rather than
commit the sin of performing, in the House of God, one gesture which
they believed to be displeasing to Him. Did those brave exiles think it
inconsistent with civil or religious freedom that the State should take
charge of the education of the people? No, Sir; one of the earliest laws
enacted by the Puritan colonists was that every township, as soon as the
Lord had increased it to the number of fifty houses, should appoint one
to teach all children to write and read, and that every township of a
hundred houses should set up a grammar school. Nor have the descendants
of those who made this law ever ceased to hold that the public
authorities were bound to provide the means of public instruction. Nor
is this doctrine confined to New England. "Educate the people" was
the first admonition addressed by Penn to the colony which he founded.
"Educate the people" was the legacy of Washington to the nation which
he had saved. "Educate the people" was the unceasing exhortation of
Jefferson; and I quote Jefferson with peculiar pleasure, because of all
the eminent men that have ever lived, Adam Smith himself not excepted,
Jefferson was the one who most abhorred everything like meddling on the
part of governments. Yet the chief business of his later years was to
establish a good system of State education in Virginia.
And, against such authority as this, what have you who take the other
side to show? Can you mention a single great philosopher, a single man
distinguished by his zeal for liberty, humanity, and truth, who, from
the beginning of the world down to the time of this present Parliament,
ever held your doctrines? You can oppose to the unanimous voice of all
the wise and good, of all ages, and of both hemispheres, nothing but a
clamour which was first heard a few months ago, a clamour in which you
cannot join without condemning, not only all whose memory you profess to
hold in reverence, but even your former selves.
This new theory of politics has at least the merit of originality. It
may be fairly stated thus. All men have hitherto been utterly in the
wrong as to the nature and objects of civil government. The great truth,
hidden from every preceding generation, and at length revealed, in the
year 1846, to some highly respectable ministers and elders of dissenting
congregations, is this. Government is simply a great hangman. Government
ought to do nothing except by harsh and degrading means. The one
business of Government is to handcuff, and lock up, and scourge, and
shoot, and stab, and strangle. It is odious tyranny in a government to
attempt to prevent crime by informing the understanding and elevating
the moral feeling of a people. A statesman may see hamlets turned, in
the course of one generation, into great seaport towns and manufacturing
towns. He may know that on the character of the vast population which is
collected in those wonderful towns, depends the prosperity, the peace,
the very existence of society. But he must not think of forming that
character. He is an enemy of public liberty if he attempts to prevent
those hundreds of thousands of his countrymen from becoming mere Yahoos.
He may, indeed, build barrack after barrack to overawe them. If they
break out into insurrection, he may send cavalry to sabre them: he may
mow them down with grape shot: he may hang them, draw them, quarter
them, anything but teach them. He may see, and may shudder as he sees,
throughout large rural districts, millions of infants growing up from
infancy to manhood as ignorant, as mere slaves of sensual appetite, as
the beasts that perish. No matter. He is a traitor to the cause of civil
and religious freedom if he does not look on with folded arms, while
absurd hopes and evil passions ripen in that rank soil. He must wait for
the day of his harvest. He must wait till the Jaquerie comes, till farm
houses are burning, till threshing machines are broken in pieces; and
then begins his business, which is simply to send one poor ignorant
savage to the county gaol, and another to the antipodes, and a third to
the gallows.
Such, Sir, is the new theory of government which was first propounded,
in the year 1846, by some men of high note among the Nonconformists of
England. It is difficult to understand how men of excellent abilities
and excellent intentions--and there are, I readily admit, such men
among those who hold this theory--can have fallen into so absurd and
pernicious an error. One explanation only occurs to me. This is, I am
inclined to believe, an instance of the operation of the great law of
reaction. We have just come victorious out of a long and fierce contest
for the liberty of trade. While that contest was undecided, much was
said and written about the advantages of free competition, and about the
danger of suffering the State to regulate matters which should be left
to individuals. There has consequently arisen in the minds of persons
who are led by words, and who are little in the habit of making
distinctions, a disposition to apply to political questions and moral
questions principles which are sound only when applied to commercial
questions. These people, not content with having forced the Government
to surrender a province wrongfully usurped, now wish to wrest from the
Government a domain held by a right which was never before questioned,
and which cannot be questioned with the smallest show of reason. "If,"
they say, "free competition is a good thing in trade, it must surely be
a good thing in education. The supply of other commodities, of sugar,
for example, is left to adjust itself to the demand; and the consequence
is, that we are better supplied with sugar than if the Government
undertook to supply us. Why then should we doubt that the supply of
instruction will, without the intervention of the Government, be found
equal to the demand?"
Never was there a more false analogy. Whether a man is well supplied
with sugar is a matter which concerns himself alone. But whether he is
well supplied with instruction is a matter which concerns his neighbours
and the State. If he cannot afford to pay for sugar, he must go without
sugar. But it is by no means fit that, because he cannot afford to pay
for education, he should go without education. Between the rich and
their instructors there may, as Adam Smith says, be free trade. The
supply of music masters and Italian masters may be left to adjust itself
to the demand. But what is to become of the millions who are too poor
to procure without assistance the services of a decent schoolmaster? We
have indeed heard it said that even these millions will be supplied with
teachers by the free competition of benevolent individuals who will vie
with each other in rendering this service to mankind. No doubt there are
many benevolent individuals who spend their time and money most laudably
in setting up and supporting schools; and you may say, if you please,
that there is, among these respectable persons, a competition to do
good. But do not be imposed upon by words. Do not believe that this
competition resembles the competition which is produced by the desire of
wealth and by the fear of ruin. There is a great difference, be assured,
between the rivalry of philanthropists and the rivalry of grocers. The
grocer knows that, if his wares are worse than those of other grocers,
he shall soon go before the Bankrupt Court, and his wife and children
will have no refuge but the workhouse: he knows that, if his shop
obtains an honourable celebrity, he shall be able to set up a carriage
and buy a villa: and this knowledge impels him to exertions compared
with which the exertions of even very charitable people to serve
the poor are but languid. It would be strange infatuation indeed to
legislate on the supposition that a man cares for his fellow creatures
as much as he cares for himself.
Unless, Sir, I greatly deceive myself, those arguments, which show
that the Government ought not to leave to private people the task
of providing for the national defence, will equally show that the
Government ought not to leave to private people the task of providing
for national education. On this subject, Mr Hume has laid down the
general law with admirable good sense and perspicuity. I mean David
Hume, not the Member for Montrose, though that honourable gentleman
will, I am confident, assent to the doctrine propounded by his
illustrious namesake. David Hume, Sir, justly says that most of the
arts and trades which exist in the world produce so much advantage and
pleasure to individuals, that the magistrate may safely leave it to
individuals to encourage those arts and trades. But he adds that there
are callings which, though they are highly useful, nay, absolutely
necessary to society, yet do not administer to the peculiar pleasure
or profit of any individual. The military calling is an instance. Here,
says Hume, the Government must interfere. It must take on itself to
regulate these callings, and to stimulate the industry of the persons
who follow these callings by pecuniary and honorary rewards.
Now, Sir, it seems to me that, on the same principle on which Government
ought to superintend and to reward the soldier, Government ought to
superintend and to reward the schoolmaster. I mean, of course, the
schoolmaster of the common people. That his calling is useful, that his
calling is necessary, will hardly be denied. Yet it is clear that
his services will not be adequately remunerated if he is left to be
remunerated by those whom he teaches, or by the voluntary contributions
of the charitable. Is this disputed? Look at the facts. You tell us that
schools will multiply and flourish exceedingly, if the Government will
only abstain from interfering with them. Has not the Government long
abstained from interfering with them? Has not everything been left,
through many years, to individual exertion? If it were true that
education, like trade, thrives most where the magistrate meddles least,
the common people of England would now be the best educated in the
world. Our schools would be model schools. Every one would have a well
chosen little library, excellent maps, a small but neat apparatus for
experiments in natural philosophy. A grown person unable to read and
write would be pointed at like Giant O'Brien or the Polish Count.
Our schoolmasters would be as eminently expert in all that relates to
teaching as our cutlers, our cotton-spinners, our engineers are allowed
to be in their respective callings. They would, as a class, be held in
high consideration; and their gains would be such that it would be
easy to find men of respectable character and attainments to fill up
vacancies.