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ART. II. - POPULAR EDUCATION IN LARGE

TOWNS.

1. Inquiry into the Educational and other Conditions of a District in Deansgate. By the Manchester Statistical Society. November, 1864.

2. First Report of the Manchester and Salford Education Aid Society. 1865.

THAT current of human affairs, which is generally designated by the name of progress, is every day making it more impossible for human beings to live in civilized communities without the rudiments of education. Whether we desire it or not, it is making society continually more complex, building up great cities, inventing new machinery, netting the world with railways and electric telegraphs, and drilling the human race into modes of life of which the foundation is as much artificial as natural. In this state of things a man who does not keep pace with the knowledge of his time becomes more helpless every day. When life was chiefly agricultural or pastoral, it was otherwise. The ploughman or the shepherd each has his value in his own place, his duties being simple, unchanging, and almost independent of any mental culture. And when the world went on in the old rustic way, it scarcely mattered whether Hodge had learnt his letters or not. But in our days, so rapid are the changes which whirl us about, that no man knows what may be required of him next year; and if our uneducated field-worker, with his family, should be drifted into a large town, with no human being above his own condition who knows of his existence, and should there be suddenly cast out of employment, it is very possible that the darkness and hopelessness of his lot would at once break down his spirit, his self-respect, and every safeguard of good conduct.

It is not possible for any of our readers to imagine what his own condition would have been, supposing him never to have learnt to read. But it may be worth a few moments' thought to make the attempt to understand it in some faint degree. When we see a blind man our sympathy is awakened because the fearfulness of his privation is so manifest. But it is not so easy to get a clear notion of the state of the man who has eyes and sees not. Almost everything of our modern civilization has come to be the property of those who can read and write. We no more think of addressing the uneducated with hieroglyphics now, than we expect a public speaker to interpret his spoken words with the finger-alphabet, for the benefit

of

The Uneducated Man.

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of the deaf and dumb. In mile-stones and finger-posts on the highways, in street names in towns, in placards upon walls, in labels in shops, in advertisements in newspapers, in railway tickets and time-tables, in sign-boards and printed and painted directions at every step, our business-life assumes that all men are instructed in eye-language as well as in earlanguage. The poor man who enters upon the responsibilities of life without the rudiments of education, slowly opens his eyes to the fact that he is in a world of treasures locked up, of which he has not the key. He comes at length, perhaps, to a dim apprehension that he belongs to an inferior order of beings, or that the true man in him, which might successfully have done battle with the difficulties that beset him, is still locked in the slumber of a chrysalis state. Hence the preternaturally intelligent boy of the streets becomes the stolid and lethargic man. He grows accustomed to see and hear, like a cow or a horse, a thousand things pass around him which he does not understand; and he grows resigned, hopelessly and helplessly resigned, to his fate. If he can keep in some groove in which he has begun, bearing all burdens, his life may run out without any greater disaster than that which is involved in the fact of a human soul living a life intellectually very little above that of the lower animals. But if by some change he be thrown loose from his old moorings, what creature in the universe so desolate and helpless as he? Life runs past him day by day, and leaves him stranded. He sees that a universe of ideas, knowledge, and activity lies around him, of which he can take no cognizance. His faculties are awakened just enough, perhaps, to show him what he lacks. What wonder that he often seeks to drown these dim perceptions, with the remembrance of his miseries, in some muddy pool of sensual indulgence?

And look, again, at the uneducated man in relation to spiritual culture. He is almost necessarily coarse, cloddish, unimaginative, unpoetical, painfully literal. With educated

people, especially in modern times, thought not only finds its expression in, but is chiefly carried on by the help of, symbols drawn from nature, or the sciences, or literature, and especially from poetry. Words, therefore, come to have many senses, according to the connection in which they are used. And a whole and extensive language exists, in a region entirely above the region of life of the work-day world. The illiterate man lacks the very machinery of thought. For, in the intellectual as well as the physical region, modern life is full of mechanism, of which the thinkers and poets of all ages are the inventors. Every extension or new application of science,

every new item of knowledge-astronomical, geological, chemical, or biological-is immediately seized by the imagination (the pioneer of thought), and beyond and above the duty it performs in the lower physical region of life, it is idealized and made a basis of a new series of intellectual images, deductions, and illustrations. Thus, as the earth beneath becomes more fruitful to the advancing intellect, the soul finds, in its own region, the corresponding archetypes of physical phenomena, extending its domain into the heaven of thought. This connection of the spiritual and the physical is not fanciful, but real. Nature and science furnish us, not only with similes and comparisons, but also with implements and weapons by which new regions of the soul's heritage are opened out and brought under its dominion. From all this the ignorant man is shut out. His state realizes the old stories of enchantment; he carries his human instinct buried under an exterior almost satyr-like, and feels his loss, though he cannot speak it.

With the church he connects the ideas of baptisms, marriages, and funerals, but usually seems to consider that he has nothing to do with any other religious observances. Ask a clergyman who knows well some of the more densely peopled districts in large towns, respecting the attendance of his parishioners at his or any other place of worship. Some of those who have made special inquiries from house to house, have found that not one in ten of the grown people ever go to any place of worship. Why is it that in our day this dulness. of intellect and this absence of religious culture and æsthetic feeling characterize the illiterate man? Is it not because literature has now become almost our only teacher? We often speak with pride and exultation of the triumphs which the press has achieved in our day. The daily press,' as Carlyle has said, 'is the preaching dervish of our age.' Before the invention of printing, books were as rare as gems. It was then necessary that the orator and the artist should have much more to do with teaching than now. The Catholic Church of the middle ages appealed, by its symbols, its oral instructions, and its works of art, to the unlearned as well as to the learned. Its pre-eminence in shows and ceremonials has sprung from this very necessity of the past. But in modern England the printing press has taken the place of almost all other modes of teaching, and has given to literature such an overpowering influence upon the educated classes, that a new and distinct literary vocabulary has grown up, so that, if a man be unable to read, he will seldom be able to hear a sermon that he can understand. Moreover, if he goes to a church, he is expected

to

The Large Town Populations.

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to use several books, and if these are unintelligible to him, while at the same time he is unable to make out the sense of the sermon because of his own limited knowledge of words, is it likely he will be often attracted thither?

Some of the churches, alas! seem to have almost forgotten that Christianity is sent especially to instruct the poor and to save the lost. They preach to the intelligent classes, and make it fashionable and proper to attend their services. Those who are not fashionable and proper, therefore, naturally shun them. The established routine supposes every person to be intelligent, but the great mass of the nation is not brought up to the degree of intelligence necessary to enable them to enter with heart and understanding into the forms of worship which refined taste finds necessary. And yet the churches are the appointed educators of the nation. The office has been demanded by them, and accorded to them. What is to be the future of the people and of the churches? Is the mass of the nation to sink into heathenism? Are we to have churces? for the educated only, and are the people to be abandoned? Can we flatter ourselves that the command of Him who said to His disciples, 'Go, teach all nations,' is in this age complied with? When shall we see in the churches those signs of Divine manifestation to which He appealed, 'to the poor the gospel is preached,' and 'the common people hear gladly?' Let us by no means be understood to intimate that religion cannot purify and ennoble the uneducated man. We believe some of those upon whom Christianity has exercised its highest influences have been ignorant men and women. But if the ignorant are to be virtually excluded from hearing and knowing anything about Christianity, how can its influence be brought to bear upon them? Religion is now, apparently, considered rather as an accomplishment than as a necessity of life for every human being.

Looking to the disintegrating forces in operation, and to the fewness and feebleness of the conservative agencies to counteract them, we need not be surprised to find that in all our large towns, and in many small towns also, there are vast populations, crowded together in small spaces, in filth and squalor indescribable, without regard to the decencies of life, and amongst many of whom even the ordinary notions of morality are either extinct, or have never come into conscious existence. In short, in this triumphant nineteenth century, great numbers of the people have gone back into savagism in the chief cities of this great and wealthy country. There are nearly a million of paupers, normally, in England and Wales, costing £6,000,000 sterling per annum. And crime abounds to

such

such an extent that the expenditure for prisons and police in this country, for 1861, was £4,500,000 sterling, and it was estimated at the same time, that there were 130,000 criminals at large, preying on the community. The cost of these criminals to the country, estimating them at only £50 per annum each, will be £6,500,000 sterling, making the whole cost of crime £11,000,000 per annum. Pauperism and crime, therefore, burden us to the extent of £17,000,000 per annum, or four times the amount needed to educate every working man's child in the kingdom.

As material prosperity has advanced, and wealth has accumulated, this degraded population has grown in numbers. There are more rich men, and the rich men are richer, than formerly, but the poor have increased in numbers more rapidly than the rich, and their poverty is deeper, more squalid, and more difficult to relieve than ever, because it is a poverty of thought and good principles, still more than of food and clothing. It is the necessary consequence of the attempt to make men with unawakened intellect and uninstructed consciences fill a place in the midst of an artificial society which has made culture indispensable. It is now more literally true than in any former age, that 'the people perish for lack of knowledge.'

The perception of the necessity of general education in these altered times has been growing for more than half a century. In most civilized countries it has been vigorously attempted, and in some it has been fairly accomplished. In the two chief republics of the world-the United States and Switzerland-every child is taught at the public expense. In most of the more despotically governed German States, education of all the children is also accomplished, by compulsory laws, and at the public cost. In freer Holland there are excellent free schools for the poor, and those who do not educate their children are entered in a black book, and suffer under certain disabilities. France and Italy are making rapid progress in education. In the chief British colonies excellent common schools are supported at the public expense. England, foremost as she is in wealth and in material progress, claiming the position of leader in philanthropic movements—and among whose artizan population, more than among any other people, education has become a necessity of life-has half the nation receiving no instruction of any practical value.

For the last thirty years, it is true, an experiment has been in progress in this country, and a constantly growing proportion of the public revenue has been devoted to this experiment, until the sum yearly voted has reached more

than