III. My father and his clerks must have done a great deal of
arithmetical and epistolary work, before my father could have profit
enough from the wine to pay for our horses, and our dinner.
IV. The tailor must have given his life to the dull business of making
clothes—the wheelwright and carriage-maker to their woodwork—the smith
to his buckles and springs—the postillion to his riding—the
horse-breeder and breaker to the cattle in his field and stable,—before
I could make progress in this pleasant manner, even for a single stage.
V. Sundry English Kings and Barons must have passed their lives in
military exercises, and gone to their deaths in military practices, to
provide me with my forenoons’ entertainments in ruined castles; or
founded the great families whose servants were to be my hosts.
VI. Vandyck and Velasquez, and many a painter before them, must have
spent their lives in learning and practising their laborious
businesses.
VII. Various monks and abbots must have passed their lives in pain,
with fasting and prayer; and a large company of stonemasons occupied
themselves in their continual service, in order to provide me, in
defect of castles and noblemen’s seats, with amusement in the way of
abbeys and cathedrals.
How far, then, it remains to be asked, supposing my education in any
wise exemplary, can all these advantages be supplied by the modern
school board, to every little boy born in the prosperous England of
this day? And much more in that glorious England of the future; in
which there will be no abbeys, (all having been shaken down, as my own
sweet Furness is fast being, by the luggage trains); no castles, except
such as may have been spared to be turned into gaols, like that of
“time-honoured Lancaster,” also in my own neighbourhood; no parks,
because Lord Derby’s patent steam agriculture will have cut down all
the trees; no lords, nor dukes, because modern civilization won’t be
Lorded over, nor Led anywhere; no gentlemen’s seats, except in the
Kirby Lonsdale style; and no roads anywhere, except trams and rails?
Before, however, entering into debate as to the methods of education to
be adopted in these coming times, let me examine a little, in next
letter, with help from my readers of aristocratic tendencies, what the
real product of this olden method of education was intended to be; and
whether it was worth the cost.
For the impression on the aristocratic mind of the day was always
(especially supposing I had been a squire’s or a lord’s son, instead of
a merchant’s) that such little jaunty figure, trotting in its easy
chariot, was, as it were, a living diamond, without which the watch of
the world could not possibly go; or even, that the diminutive darling
was a kind of Almighty Providence in its first breeches, by whose tiny
hands and infant fiat the blessings of food and raiment were
continually provided for God’s Spanish labourers in His literal
vineyard; for God’s English sailors, seeing His wonders in the deep;
for God’s tailors’ men, sitting in attitude of Chinese Josh for ever;
for the divinely appointed wheelwrights, carpenters, horses and riders,
hostlers and Gaius-mine-hosts, necessary to my triumphal progress; and
for my nurse behind in the dickey. And it never once entered the head
of any aristocratic person,—nor would ever have entered mine, I
suppose, unless I had “the most analytical mind in Europe,”—that in
verity it was not I who fed my nurse, but my nurse me; and that a great
part of the world had been literally put behind me as a dickey,—and all
the aforesaid inhabitants of it, somehow, appointed to be nothing but
my nurses; the beautiful product intended, by papa and mamma, being—a
Bishop, who should graciously overlook these tribes of inferior beings,
and instruct their ignorance in the way of their souls’ salvation.
As the master of the St. George’s Company, I request their permission
to convey their thanks to Mr. Plimsoll, for his Christian, knightly,
and valiant stand, made against the recreant English Commons, on
Thursday, 22nd July, 1875.