whipping-posts in this kingdom." After the Revolution, Child could do what Boisguilbert and Vauban could never do. He could publicly admonish the king and parliament that they must be careful not to mistake effects for causes.

Before the Restoration, Biddle had set his face against indiscriminate almsgiving. "Sometimes we are able," he wrote, “ to assist by our counsel or our interest more than by our charity.” Thomas Gouge, rector of St. Sepulchre's until 1662, had, as Tillotson tells us, set the poor of his parish to work “ at his own charge, himself bearing the loss." This, Tillotson thought, was a very wise and well-chosen way of doing good.

Biddle and Gouge were intimate friends of Mr. Thomas Firmin (1632-1697). Firmin (Cromwell's " you curl-pate boy ") was the outstanding philanthropist of the last third of the seventeenth century. He came to be known as the almoner-general of the poor, and so won the public confidence that he was entrusted with the administration of the national bounty to the fugitive Huguenots. One of his first services was in the years of the Plague and the Fire. Employment was scanty and food and fuel were dear. He provided work and built a warehouse for the sale of corn and coal at cost price. Later on he established his "workhouse," wherein he sometimes employed "sixteen or seventeen hundred spinners, besides dressers of flax " and others. As an employer he held that "cleanliness contributed much to health," and acted accordingly. "Workhouses" found much favour in England and Holland, and some favour in France. Berkeley praised them, but Defoe's objection was unanswerable: "For every skein these poor children spun, a skein the less was spun by some poor family elsewhere." The experiment was worth the making. It explored what proved to be a blind alley, and enabled others to label it "no thoroughfare."

Firmin argued that it is "twice as great. an act of charity to keep a man from falling and breaking his head than (sic) to take him up and give him a plaister." He vigorously promoted Acts of Grace for debtors and prosecuted jailors so effectively that one jailor made a rope and hanged himself. He had "a mighty interest in both Houses of Parliament." He did not mean "to die worth above twenty pound "; but, guilty as he was of " the folly of spending his continued thoughts, the greatest part of his time and large portions of his money upon the poor," he was,

like Mr. Carnegie, disappointed. His unorthodoxy gave some concern to Queen Mary, and lent point to Pepys's jibe that neglect of the poor is as little evidence of the true faith as the care of them is a justification of the mistaken one (sic) of Mr. Firmin."

Robert Nelson (1656-1715) was a high Churchman and a Nonjuror, but religious conviction did not impair his friendships. He and Firmin sometimes worked together. Tillotson cannot but have grieved him when he took Sancroft's archiepiscopal see, but Tillotson died in his arms. When his own time came, this staunchest of staunch Churchmen must have died in the arms of one of the staunchest of Dissenting women-his " dear cousin, Mrs. Delitia Woolf "--who nursed him during his last illness, and to whom he left not only a large legacy, but also " pictures of my father and mother, a picture of her father and of my own, drawn by Sir Godfrey Kneller-also to my said cousin Delitiæ Woolf, the pearl necklace formerly my mother's."

Nelson was a founder of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, and urged the provision of parochial "workhouses," of training colleges for teachers, of special hospitals for special ailments, of penitentiaries for fallen women, and of a hospital for foundlings. One of his claims on our interest is his care for street arabs-" blackguard boys," as he and his contemporaries used to call them. He was one of the prime instigators of that great movement for the foundation of charity schools, which so quickly enlisted the sympathy of London and, indeed, of the whole of the country.

In 1687, James II published his " Declaration of Indulgence." Poulton (or Pulteney), a "subtile and projecting Jesuit," at once founded a short-lived free school in the Savoy. Thereupon, Tenison-at that time Rector of St. Martin's-in-the-Fieldsfounded a charity school in Westminster; and Mr. Arthur Shallet, a Protestant Dissenting merchant, founded another in Southwark "for the children of the poorest sort of watermen and fishermen." Other schools were opened by the Protestant Dissenters. Their standard of education was above the average, but they took a secondary place. Their numerical inferiority can easily be explained. After the passing of the Toleration Act, the building of meeting houses and the maintenance of ministers must have imposed a heavy tax on the richer of the Nonconformists. Some

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must have lost heavily by the Great Fire, which, says Defoe, delayed" philanthropy in London until the Peace of Ryswick in 1697. Even that peace may not, at once, have been helpful, for some four years later Shallet and others petitioned parliament concerning £300,000 due to them for services rendered during the war; and just before King William's death, Shallet, who had sat in the preceding parliament, submitted his case to the House of Commons. He set forth that his ships had been impressed for the king's service; that five of them had been destroyed by the French fleet, and others wrecked by a great storm; that the sum of £40,000 was owing to him from the Crown; that during the last four years he had paid to the Crown £60,000 in customs and duties; that his creditors had taken his body and carried it to the Marshalsea; and that if the nation would pay its debt, he would be solvent again. Shallet must have been in dire straits, but his school flourished for many years. Nelson and his friends had ampler resources, and the main bulk of the schools was of their founding.

These schools had their critics. Some, it was said, were nurseries of little Jacobites. Watts countenanced this charge, and in 1716 the primate advised trustees to avoid politics and to require their teachers to take the oath of allegiance. Later on, a contributor to the Old Whig found children teaching children; but another visitor to certain schools found the children " making speeches or holding dialogues"! Mandeville objected to subjecting the children of the poor " to a better discipline than that of the street"; nobody, he said, would be willing to do “slavish, dirty work." Others thought that "low" children might be taught to read, but not to write or cypher. As was to be expected of one who held that " the chief end of man is his head " and that lads of bright genius "ought to be encouraged, Watts defended the new schools. The author of "Pamela " might have taken his cue from Watts's argument that there was no reason why “ a poor servant may not have the privilege of conveying his thoughts to a dear relation, to a father or mother, a brother or a sister." Both the divine and the printer were in favour of a vocation for girls.

The champions of writing and cyphering must have won the day, for after Tom Jones fell in with "a lame fellow in rags and recovered Sophia's little gilt pocket-book and her bank bill

for 100l., the lame fellow, when he saw what a prize he had parted with, cursed not only Jones and Partridge, but also his father and mother, "for had they, said he, sent me to charity school to learn to write and read and cast accounts, I should have known the value of these matters as well as others."

"The yearly procession of these little eleemosynaries" (these "flowers of London town," as Blake was to call them later on) must have been a great sight; and St. Sepulchre's must have been well filled if, as the London Magazine tells us, on the twentieth day of April, 1732, six thousand of them were conducted by their trustees, teachers and parish beadles to that church for their annual sermon. Mandeville disliked to see the children thus "marched two and two in good order, all whole and tight in the same cloathes." But at an earlier day, Steele had been "much pleased and affected by the little boys and girls . . . . ranged with so much order and decency. . . . a spectacle pleasing to God and man." "I have always (he said) looked on the institution of charity schools-which of late years has so universally prevailed through the whole nation-as the glory of the age we live in and the most proper means that can be made use of to recover it out of its present degeneracy and depravation.'

Mandeville proves that the populace was in hearty agreement with Steele. In 1724, when the word " enthusiastick " was anything but eulogistic, Mandeville, after writing of the "enthusiastick passion" for the new schools, declared that any one opposing them was in danger of stoning by the rabble. He confirms what we learn elsewhere that the religious societies founded by Horneck and fostered by Nelson, and similar societies of young Protestant Dissenters were zealous supporters of the movement. He wrote: First we must look out for young shopkeepers that have not half the business they could wish for, and consequently time to spare. If such a new beginner has but a little more pride than ordinary, and loves to be meddlesome, he is soon mortify'd [if he stands for the Vestry and is defeated by men of substance and long-standing]; he thinks it a thousand pities there is no charity school in the parish. He communicates his thoughts to two or three of his acquaintances. .. another month there is nothing else talked of in the parish. . Religion is the theme or else the misery of the poor.

in

Mandeville says that these young men were actuated by " the

Guardian, July 11, 1713.

common cant of charity and religion." However that may have been, their meddlesomeness led them to do some useful and sorely needed work. Before 1750, scores of thousands of children had been taken out of the kennels and had passed through naries and Nurseries of the Commonwealth." A conviction grew and persisted that "the rising generation was the hope of the nation"; and, by 1750, that hope was on its way to fulfilment.

Education tended to separate Churchmen and Nonconformists. The urgent need of moral reform helped to bring them together. As Calamy wrote in 1699, it was "a hopeful prognostic that those who differ in rituals . . . should unanimously join together in forming those societies [for the Reformation of Manners] which aim at the checking of those vices." Two years earlier, John Russell, preaching at St. Mary-le-Bow on the oppression of the hireling and the selling of the poor for a pair of shoes, went on to say that "after this design was begun by members of the Church of England, many Dissenters (be it spoken to their greatest commendation and praise) did join with them. . . without the least animosity and jarring about the unhappy difference that lies between us."* A very different man thought much the same. "Who could imagine," Matthew Tindal asked in 1711," that in Ch II's reign, private men would have had the countenance of royal authority in forming a society for the Reformation of Manners, or that most of the pulpits would not have railed against it as a Puritanical design?"

A multitude of these societies sprang into life immediately after the Revolution. Their aim was, as Thomas Newman said in 1729, that" our city may be justly styled a city of righteousness and even the lower world become a new earth." They were, however, prosecuting societies and made many enemies. Like the Lord Mayor, the University of Cambridge and all those in authority, they employed informers. They were slow to proceed against the nobility and gentry.

*The Revolution enabled Churchmen and Dissenters to fraternize in more ways than one. In March, 1731, the Society of Ancient Britons had its annual feast. The Anglican members went to church. The Nonconformists had their religious service in Haberdashers' Hall. Both parties then went in procession to Leathersellers' Hall for a “fine entertainment" and "loyal toasts," "concluding the evening in a peaceable manner.-London Journal, March 6, 1731.