ART. VII.-1. Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the State of Popular Education in England. London, 1861. 2. Communications from E. Chadwick, Esq., C.B., respecting HalfTime, and Military and Naval Drill, and on the Time and Cost of Popular Education on a Large and on a Small Scale. 1861. 3. A Letter to N. W. Senior, Esq., Explanatory of Communications, &c. By Edwin Chadwick, Esq., C.B. 1861. 4. Suggestions on Popular Education. By Nassau W. Senior. London, 1861. 5. Sunshine in the Workhouse. By Mrs. G. W. Sheppard. London, 1861. 6. The Workhouse Orphan. By the Author of 'A Plea for the Helpless.' London, 1861. 7. On Girls' Industrial Training. By Rev. J. P. Norris, late Fellow of Sion College, Cambridge, and one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools. London, 1860. 8. Two Letters on Girls' Schools, and on the Training of Working Women. By Mrs. Austen. London, 1857. 9. The Claims of Ragged Schools to Pecuniary Educational Aid from the Annual Parliamentary Grant, as an integral part of the Educational Movement of the Country. By Mary Carpenter. London and Bristol. 10. Report on the Education of Destitute Children. July, 1861. IN dealing with the question of popular education, our legislators and philanthropists are sorely puzzled to lay down any theory of the duties of the State as to the education of its subjects which is applicable to our anomalous system, combined as it is of voluntary effort, private charity, and public aid. Mr. Senior, by an ascending climax of 'Resolutions,' arrives at the proposition that education is as much the right of the infant as bread, and that if the State is unable to compel the parent to give either the one or the other, it must constitute itself in loco parentis,' and perform the duty which it has failed to enforce. But instead of deducing from these broad premises their legitimate conclusion that the State is bound to provide all the necessary machinery of coercion and of education, he contents himself with the narrow inference that the State is bound to aid private charity in providing the sum that is not obtainable from the parent.' He doubtless gives the reader credit for * appreciating appreciating the resistances which make fact and theory at variance. To compel education would require a power which the law scarcely claims, and an amount of interference which is repugnant to the feelings, and hardly compatible with the institutions of the country. At all events, the House of Commons has positively declared itself against compulsory education, and any perceptible approach to it is resisted. The result is a complication of anomalies. The Government, in advance of popular feeling, forces its way in promoting education as it can, rather than as it would; and in making its encroachments, as they may be called rather than advances, it has not always regarded consistency, nor even justice. As occasion serves from time to time, it imposes previous education as a condition on the employment of children in certain trades; glad to weaken opposition by attacking the manufacturers in detail, and careless how much the trade so restricted suffers by competition in the labour-market with trades where no restriction is imposed; and when at last, by making education compulsory on all trades, this injustice shall have been removed, the absurdity will yet remain, that the child who is willing to work for his bread with his hands is forbidden to do so till he has qualified himself by intellectual cultivation, while he whose parents are content to 'mar him with idleness,' is 'free as Nature first made man, When wild in woods the noble savage ran,' and now in streets the ignoble savage runs. To save the credit of the Legislature it has been suggested that the relation between employer and employed is a public one, which the State may regulate, while that between parent and child is a private one, with which it does not care to meddle. The distinction is scarcely sound, and was probably an after-thought. On whom presses the double burden of educating the child and of losing its earnings but on its parent or guardian? The plain truth was, the Legislature found it could get at the employer without raising a formidable outcry, and without much cost or difficulty. The parent it could not reach without a degree of despotism it could not exercise, and an organization of schools and police which it does not possess. The expenses of popular education in this country are mainly defrayed by private charity, the most gigantic effort ever made by private charity to perform a public duty. But the State, through the agency of a Committee of Privy Council, contributes its aid on condition of the fulfilment of certain requirements; and thus it exercises an indirect control over the national education hardly less less complete than would be conferred by the avowed direction of the whole scheme. One principal objection to this plan is that it throws too much of the burden on the willing horse, a difficulty which constantly presents itself in working the system, and which threatens its ultimate failure when we arrive at the point when the willing horse can no longer be found, or is unable to do all the work that is required of him. Yet with all its defects the present is the only scheme which could have been introduced into our free, tolerant, dissentient, and jealous country, or, being introduced, could have been worked at all. It has grown up gradually, the creation of circumstances, and has adapted itself to them; like some tree self-sown on a rock, whose misshapen but healthy roots bear the impress of the fissures from whence they spring. It has unquestionably done much good: whether it has done all the good it might have done, and whether any change in its constitution or machinery is desirable, remains to be considered. The Report of the Royal Commission which was appointed to inquire into the state of popular education, brings the whole subject before the bar of public opinion. The mass of evidence which the Commission has collected in its three years' labours gives the fullest and most important information on the subject of education ever presented to the public, and the Report, coupled with the able volume of 'Suggestions' by Mr. Senior, who differed on some important points from his colleagues, puts us in possession of all that the Commissioners singly and collectively have to suggest for the advancement of national education. The subject is too vast and too various to be fairly dealt with in such space as we can now allot to it. For the present we propose to confine our attention to the training of pauper children, and the matters more immediately connected with it; a portion of the system which most urgently calls for reform, and which can without disadvantage be considered separately from the rest. The suggestions of the Commissioners on this point are such as may be and ought to be carried into effect with the least possible delay, and independently of any other changes that may be thought advisable. Of children to whom the denomination of paupers legally belongs, as being wholly or in part supported by parochial aid, there were in 1859, according to the Poor-law Report of that year, upwards of 336,500, and of these nearly 45,000 were inmates of the workhouse, and therefore completely within the paternal and absolute control of the State. But, unhappily in the education of pauper children the new Poor-law has signally failed. The blame, indeed, cannot fairly be imputed to the framers of the measure. The Poor-Law Amendment Act is the 6 In first that makes any mention of the education of paupers. pursuance of its provisions the Poor-law Commissioners ordered, that for three working hours at least of every day the boys and girls who are inmates of a workhouse shall receive instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the principles of the Christian religion; and such other instruction shall be imparted to them as may train them in habits of usefulness, industry, and virtue.' But the quality of the instruction provided by the ratepaying guardians was such as to neutralize this well-meant regulation. In 1846,' says Mr. Senior, 'Government seems to have despaired of persuading the guardians to pay adequate salaries to schoolmasters, and to have been afraid to compel them. It granted 30,000l. a year, to be applied in payment of teachers, and the Privy Council engaged to inspect the schools.'-(P. 91.) The tuition in the workhouse schools was accordingly much improved. The testimony of the Report on this point is remarkable, and suggests an inference to which we shall advert presently; at present, we adduce it here only to prove that improved tuition is no antidote to the moral poison of the workhouse. The contaminating intercourse of the adults is so fatal that, even of the orphans, who have no parents to misguide them, and who accordingly are observed to form, as a class, the best conducted portion of the schools, scarcely one in three, according to the most favourable calculations, does tolerably well in after-life. No love of independence, no self-relying energy, no decent self-respect, can spring to life in this chilling atmosphere. The young grow up with few to respect and none to love-unsoftened by kindness, uncheered by hope. Having never known anything better than the dreary monotony of the workhouse, they can entertain no dread of that with which from their earliest days they have been familiar; they cannot attach the idea of disgrace to an abode which represents all they have ever known of home; they are ever drawn back to it, in after life, by some irresistible attraction, unless they rather gravitate to the gaol. The girls, more especially, return to it as to their only assured asylum, bringing with them, for the most part, fatherless children to perpetuate the race of hereditary paupers. We need not enlarge on this painful subject. The evidence on this point is overwhelming :-To the modern workhouse school attaches the curse which was inherent in the old Poor-law system altogether. It was not only an evil in itself, but it was so carried out as to perpetuate the evil it was designed to prevent.' Moreover, a considerable percentage of the children are the orphans of honest and industrious parents who have deserved of the community that their children should be taught to earn and not to beg their bread. And And these too form an annual increment to the increasing mass of pauperism and vice. 'Servitus crescit nova, nec priores The Commissioners have cited the following passages from Dr. Temple's Report: 'The workhouses are such as to ruin the effect of most of their teaching. "I think," writes one of the teachers, "the boys in this union will never be dispauperised; they have to mix with the men, most of whom are 'gaol birds.' I have found them talking to the boys about the gaol, and of bright fellows finding their way to the gaol." Another says, "I really can do nothing of any good in this place; the guardians will not give any land to be cultivated, and the dull, deadening wool-picking goes on, and I have to sit sucking my fingers. What shall I do, Sir? I cannot train the children. It appears to me to be absurd to tell these boys to be industrious, and to cultivate a proper spirit of independence; and then, after they have done schooling, to turn them adrift, with no chance whatever of being able to earn an honest living. I should be glad, Sir, if you could place me in some station where there is some real work to be done, I do not care of how rough a character." Nothing can be done while the boys are in the union," says another. "The common topic of conversation among the children is the arrival of the women of the town to be confined here," says another. Another, writing from a union where the boys work in the field with the men, remarks, "My work of three weeks is ruined in as many minutes."—(p. 354.) Miss Twining says,— 66 'A good schoolmistress was asked why she seemed so depressed and spiritless about her work in a workhouse school; and she said it was because she felt she was training up the girls for a life of vice and depravity; it was impossible under existing circumstances that it should be otherwise; one after another went out to carry on the lessons she had learnt from the adults, and she returned like them, ruined and degraded, to be a life-long pauper.'-(p. 355.) Mr. Cumin says, 'It seems impossible to exaggerate the spirit of lying, low cunning, laziness, insubordination, and profligacy which characterize the pauper class in workhouses; and this spirit naturally infects the mass of poor children who are born and bred up in so pestilential an atmosphere. The master of the Bedminster union, where old and young work together in the garden, told me that he could observe a marked deterioration in them after they come away from such out-door work. Moreover, I had a list furnished to me by the master and the mistress of the Plymouth workhouse of boys and girls who had left the union. This return, as far as possible, showed what had become of each individual child. Of 74 girls, I found that no fewer than 37 had returned to the workhouse; and of 56 boys, 10 or 12 had returned, many of them several |