1832.] A Project for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance. 135 



If the ignorance party should be prevailed on to follow the advice thus 

 frankly, though humbly tendered to them, they will have one great 

 advantage which their adversaries never had and never can have, namely, 

 the authority and influence of the whole corps ecclesiastic exerted in their 

 behalf: hierarchy and priesthood will be with them to a man. There 

 will be no need to order the bishops to charge. Down to the minor 

 canons all the artillery of the church are ever ready to open their brazen 

 mouths upon the cause of education. The incumbents of fat benefices 

 know that ignorance and tithe are as near akin as cause and effect, and 

 piously do they believe that tithe and gospel are convertible terms ; so 

 with their whole " vis inertiae'* of soul and body will they not fail to 

 throw themselves into the front of the battle. Then consider the univer- 

 sities on the Cam and Isis ; from remote antiquity how skilfully fortified 

 against useful knowledge ; and (with the exception of a few traitors in 

 the camp) how admirably garrisoned ! Under the joint command of her 

 two representatives representatives in the true import of the word 

 Oxford might make good her stand against the strongest force that 

 Gower-street could send against her, particularly with such a Tyrtaeus 

 as Mr. Robert Montgomery to animate her members to the conflict. At 

 first sight it seems deplorable, that the Political Economists should have 

 succeeded in establishing in the university in question a professorship of 

 that branch of knowledge ; but on the plan already explained it is far 

 from matter of regret ; all that is necessary is to take care that the chair 

 be always filled by a proper person, a point which might be secured by 

 framing an oath to be taken by candidates, solemnly abjuring (like 

 transubstantiation and divided allegiance) the doctrines of free-trade and 

 the other best-established principles of the science. 



That even by the plan here suggested, the career of intellect, after it 

 has been suffered to acquire so vast an impetus, would easily be stayed, 

 we do not presume to assert ; but sure we are, that by no other project 

 devisable in the brain of man will so desirable a consummation ever be 

 effected. The mass of reason and intelligence now accumulated in this 

 once ignorant and happy country is enormous ; and unless an over- 

 whelming weight of the contrary materials be collected and thrown into 

 the opposite scale, the evils we have already experienced are light com- 

 pared with those which await us. There must no longer be any waste 

 of ignorance permitted ; its energies must be economised and concen- 

 trated. Dissipated as they too long have been, they have produced no 

 more effect than gun-powder in a school-boy's squib ; constrain their 

 action to regular channels, and they will do the execution of gun- 

 powder in a soldier's rifle. To resume a former metaphor, we must 

 not only have dark stars, but dark constellations ay, and not only 

 constellations, but systems. The luminaries in the firmament of folly 

 must learn to regulate their motions, and darken the world by rule. 

 The wandering stars must observe orbits, and the Wetherells and Lon- 

 donderries, who may be said to be the comets of the opaque system, 

 must leave their eccentric courses, and become more efficient, even at 

 the expence of being less conspicuous, in the grand confederacy against 

 light. All the obscurity that can be collected from every quarter of 

 the unintellectual world is not depend upon it, my lords and gentle- 

 men of the conservative party ! it is not more than enough to com- 

 pensate the illumination with which the instructors and reformers of 



viom 3th 



